A Gamer’s perspective of Kingston’s 128 GB SSDNow V100 series – revisited
Conclusion
As our MrK concluded last year, SSD technology is one of the most rapidly improving. With more and more motherboard manufacturers offering SATA 3 6Gb/s ports, the ceiling for maximum transfer speeds for disk drives has been doubled from the SATA 2 3Gb/s standard. We have seen the SSD develop improved new controllers that bring faster speeds – especially to read speeds. We have watched this technology also get cheaper over time and it is much more accessible to the regular consumer and not just for enthusiasts. The Kingston SSDNow V100 series offers an incredible bang-for-buck and we have noted it is currently on sale (at the time of writing this evaluation) with its mail-in-rebate rebate bringing its final costs down to below the amazing $1-per-gigabyte value.
The 128 GB Kingston SSDNow V100 series SSD offers good performance for an affordable price and it is a solid improvement over last year’s older V series. Last year’s SSDNow V (not 100) drive showed some weird performance characteristics. When it was compared to the much more expensive and faster overall, Patriot TorqX M28 256GB SSD, the Kingston SSD would sometimes lose on random write tests and win on others, depending on the size of the block of data being transferred. We have seen great improvements in this area and the drive still retains the great characteristics which make it incredibly faster than a mechanical hard drive.
It is not “mandatory” to have a SSD if you use your PC only for gaming. A hardcore gamer would more likely save his money by buying a large fast mechanical drive and upgrading his graphics instead. Mechanical HDDs have got quite fast for gaming and their only disadvantage compared to the SSD is waiting a second or two longer for your autosave to load; or even longer for an entire level to load. However, if a gamer is impatient and wants to get right back into the game, then the SSD will definitely improve immersion and decrease frustration.
I would have liked to see Kingston offer a secure erase tool for this drive; in every other respect, it is a well-rounded SSD desktop bundle with a super balance of performance to low-price. Since the PC that this editor uses for benching has well over 250GB of just games installed, it is not practical to use a 128GB drive for benching. Neither is it practical to use it as a boot drive because we use two 500GB HDDs – one for Nvidia drivers and one for AMD drivers – and we have returned to using our Seagate HDDs for all activities. We really miss the responsiveness and quick-loading of the SSD and especially the quick-loading of Windows and game levels.
We are going to be using our Kingston SSDNow V100 128GB solid-state drive in our notebook. It will easily replace the 250GB 5400 rpm drive that is pre-installed. Since we do ninety percent of our work on our notebook, we expect a world of difference in every way and we may well have a “Part two” to this evaluation. Stayed tuned to ABT!
Pros –
- The SSD is of a magnitude faster generally than the mechanical hard drive in almost every way. Windows startup is blazing fast!
- Kingston’s SSDNow V100 128GB drive has improved in every way over the previous model.
- Kingston’s 128GB SSD offers great performance for its regular price and currently it can be found on sale!
- TRIM support and garbage collection keeps your drive “like new”.
- Excellent bundle for notebook or desktop makes setting up your SSD a breeze
- 3-year warranty and 24/7 Kingston support stand it out from the “SSD crowd”
Cons –
- Price per GB compared to mechanical hard drives is still very high.
- Limited storage compared to HDDs
The Kingston SSDNow V100 deserves the ABT Editor’s Choice award. It is a drive for gamers. There is plenty of room for Windows, applications and perhaps ten of your favorite games. Recommended.
We did not set out especially to evaluate our 500GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 drives. However, they performed admirably and demonstrate improvements in every way over the 7200.10 drives we have been depending on for just over two and one-half years. If we were giving Seagate an award, they would deserve our “Great Value” award!
Mark Poppin
ABT Senior Editor
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I was actually impressed with the performance in most everything but the games dont look nearly as impressive as say the windows start up time. The numbers are there and for gaming SSD should be low on the list of priority; A luxury that should only be considered last, if there is money left for it, after all other components are bought.
Considering the size of modern PC games, I would consider a large drive very important. 128GB would hold only a hand full of games and even less with the OS on it. I would recommend 500gb minimum for a PC gamer and thats the lowest. With the SSD the higher capacity drives are insanity expensive, 500gb drives cost nearly $1200. So a single SSD of 128gb isnt practical for the modern PC gamer and the only way it makes since is a system that has more than one drive. The SSD along with a large mechanical HDD would be the best route for a gamer that really wanted to enjoy the technology. With the OS and the most used programs on the SSD and use the other larger drive for storage.
I can see plenty of advantages in SSD. Its lightning fast for sure. I can see the potential and will go out on a limb to say the SSD will eventually replace mechanical HDDs all together. But for now, for the average PC gamer, I just dont see it as worth the price at all, especially not a system running purely SSD. If you have extra cash to blow and you just want the best of the best tech, a hybrid system with a small SSD and a large mechanical drive will give you all the speed of an SSD without any sacrifice of capacity. There are some nice 60gb SSDs for a just at 100$ and it would serve well for a hybrid system with a small investment. Enough for your OS and for your most used programs at blasting SSD speeds. You can easily move the data to storage when its not being used as much to keep the SSD with the most used programs and keep the fast. This is the best use i can imagine for a PC Gamer and the SSD.
Your conclusions are very close to mine. I got ten games on a 128GB SSD and it eventually ended up with 5 games and a lot of programs. I really never play more than about 4 or 5 games at one time although I benchmark nearly 30 games. This SSD may not be practical for my desktop but it definitely has a future in my notebook! After all, I do everything *but* game and edit video on my dual-core Athlon Compaq notebook.
However, your pricing is way off. This same $235 SSD has been on Buy.com and NewEgg.com for about $125 after a mail-in-rebate. So pricing has come way down and that $125 doesn’t buy such a great upgrade any longer.
Setting up the SDD to work seamlessly with the HDD is not difficult and the size of the SSD that you choose should reflect how many programs you want to be really fast and on the SSD itself. Windows 7 takes up a nice chunk of drive real estate and a 128GB drive becomes “full” with about 119GB of data.
If you just want a fast start-up and shutdown and maybe a few apps, then even a 30GB SSD might be sufficient.
I am just reporting that the state of the SSD art is up a level and that pricing is down. If you are looking to speed up your PC, it might be a good upgrade for a gamer.
I still wouldn’t touch an SSD. You can get a fast 2 TB HD that in most practical cases will be just a bit slower while costing far less and offering much more capacity.
Also SSD technology is still unproven in terms of reliability. I have a 13 GB HD from 2000 that still goes the last time I tried it.
As long as both technologies keep improving at the same rate, mechanical will continue to be far ahead of solid.
I felt *exactly* like you do before I got one.
– and I stand by my conclusion. It is unnecessary for a gamer; it’s just “nice” to have one in a gaming PC.
However, this SSD has a permanent home in my notebook. 5400 rpm notebook HDDs suck and 128GB is a good size for me.
I do not think I have ever seen an SSD review that good.
In fact, I did not know that an SSD review could be that good!
Hey BFG10K, at least an upgrade to SSD would show you so many more “felt” benefits than upgrading from say, 6GB to 12GB memory, or even from 4GB to 8GB. If I had to choose, I’d rather spend that $$ on a good SSD like this one here.
thats what i feel. I think the ssd technology is extremely stable thus far and a smaller drive does make since, lots more since than 12 gb of ram!!!! Also apoppin, are you saying my pricing was off on the 500gb SSDs? The cheapest 500gb SSD that i seen on new egg is $1179, if you know of some cheaper ones do let me know, i am looking at getting one for a new OS installation.
I’m sorry, I may have misunderstood you, Ocre. When you mentioned 60GB SSDs for $100, I thought that was rather expensive since this 128GB drive is only $125 after M-i-R.
Two 128GB SSDs can be set up in RAID to make the equivalent of a single 256GB capacity solid-state drive. That might just work for a gamer for a reasonable price.
no apologies please, i was hoping there were some deals i was overlooking. the SSD pricing isnt what you would expect after 160gb. I think two 125gb is much cheaper than one 250gb. then the 500gb ssd is unbelievably high. Was kinda hoping that there was some cheaper ones i didnt know about, but they will eventually come down, that i am sure.
This is the right blog for anyone who wants to find out about this topic. You realize so much its almost hard to argue with you (not that I actually would want…HaHa). You definitely put a new spin on a topic thats been written about for years. Great stuff, just great!