Kingston SSD Now V Series 128 GB Review

Conclusion

SSD tech seems to be among the most interesting technologies these days and one of the most rapidly improving. With more and more motherboard manufacturers using SATA 3 6Gb/s ports, the ceiling for maximum transfer speeds for disk drives has been doubled from the current SATA 2 3Gb/s standard. Moving forward, the SSD manufacturers will develop new controllers that can break past the SATA 2 standard and make good use of speed offered by the new SATA 3 standard. While SSDs will always strive to push the speeds to the boundaries of the SATA 3 standard, this technology will also get cheaper over time and be more accessible to the regular consumer and not just enthusiasts.

The 128 GB Kingston SSDNow V series SSD that we tested offers the latter scenario. You get good performance for an affordable price. The drive showed some weird performance characteristics. When compared to the 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. In the real world testing with AS SSD Benchmark, it became clear that the Patriot SSD was much faster. However it has to be noted that the Patriot 256 GB drive is also much more expensive. The 128 GB version is also quite a bit more than Kingston SSD. At the $250 price point, the Kingston SSD represents one of the least expensive 128 GB SSDs out there. For this price you still get access to fast seek times which are in the order of hundred times faster than conventional mechanical hard drives.

I would have liked to see Kingston deliver a firmware update for this drive to even out the performance across various data block sizes, but I was told that the next generation of SSDs from Kingston will have better sequential and random transfer speeds. Let’s hope that Kingston is able to hit the same price point or maybe even better with their new generation.

For this drive, I would like to award it the “ABT Great Value” award.

Pros

• Price
• Faster than mechanical storage (Hard Drives)
• Silent

Cons

• Performance is uneven across difference data block sizes

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