Kingston SSD Now V Series 128 GB Review
In the last few years, Solid State Drive (SSD) technology has arguably been the most exciting development. This has finally allowed things to get moving fast in the storage industry to try to match the rapid pace of development in other areas of the computer hardware equation. As it stands, SSDs have been victim of high costs per unit and as such are seen as a niche market. As with every new technology before it, the cost per item will go down as the consumer adoption increases.
Last year Kingston sought to put this exciting technology in the hands of more users than ever before. With their SSD Now V series, Kingston launched a new series of SSD lineup that would let entry-level consumers get their hands on the new SSD technology. The speeds were slow compared to the other SSDs at that time, but for the first time we could use the word affordable in the same sentence as “SSD”.
Moving forward to today, we are testing the second generation of the drives from this lineup. The read and write speeds have improved and we still get the same affordability. Kingston quotes read and write speeds of 200 MB/s and 160 MB/s respectively for the 128 GB model that we are testing today. With the smaller sized models, you get more affordability but the write speeds take a major hit. The 64 GB model offers write speeds of 110 MB/s while the 30GB model offers 50 MB/s. Even though the write speeds are significantly reduced, the read speeds remain largely unaffected. Even the smallest 30GB model offers 180 MB/s for the read speeds offering you a faster than mechanical hard drive experience.
For the 128 GB model, Kingston sent us the notebook upgrade kit. This kit includes Acronis True Image HD hard disk cloning software to enable easy transfer of data from your previous storage setup, a USB 2.0 drive enclosure that enables the use of this SSD as a portable USB hard drive and the USB 2.0 cable required for connecting the enclosure to the USB port.
Here are the specifications quoted from Kingston
- Capacity — 30 GB, 64 GB, 128 GB
- Storage Temperatures — -40° C to 85° C
- Operating temperatures — 0° C to 70° C
- Vibration Operating — 2.17 G Peak (7–800Hz)
- Vibration Non-Operation — 20 G Peak (20–2000Hz)
- Sequential Speed —
30 GB – up to 180 MB/sec. read, 50 MB/sec write
64 GB – up to 200MB/sec. read; 110MB/sec. write
128 GB – up to 200MB/sec. read; 160MB/sec. write - Power Specs —
Active: 1.7 – 5.2 W (TYP)
Sleep: 0.05 – 0.7 W (TYP) - Life expectancy — 1 million hours mean time before failure, 64 GB/128 GB
500,000 hours mean time before failure, 30 GB
SSD Tech Refresher Course
A flash cell is the most basic entity involved in making the flash memory for the SSD. But before looking at the Flash Cell (or Transistor), let’s take a look at a MOSFET (Metal Oxide Field Effect Transistor). A MOSFET has three terminals: Source, Gate and Drain. When a positive charge is applied to the gate, the electrons from the p-type substrate get pulled towards it and form a thin channel below it. Think of this channel as a bridge that allows the electrons from the source to flow to the drain (MOSFET is on and stores a 1). When the positive voltage applied to the gate is taken away, the flow of electrons from source to drain stops (MOSFET is off and stores a 0). As computers store information in 0s and 1s, a MOSFET can only store 1s as long as external power is applied to its gate. Therefore, all the 1s will be turned into 0 as soon as external power is taken away, thereby causing loss of data.
Due to this reason, MOSFETs need to be modified before they can be used for storing data without the use of external power. Enter Flash Cell, which has an extra gate called the Floating Gate.
To program the cell, a high voltage is applied to the control gate. This voltage attracts the electrons and causes them to tunnel through the oxide layer and move into the Floating Gate. This changes the value of the cell to 0. If you remove the voltage applied to the gate, the electrons will stay in the floating gate and the cell will retain its value of 0. To erase the cell, apply the voltage across the channel with reversed polarity as before. The electrons are removed from the floating gate thereby changing the value of the cell to 1. Thus this cell can store two states, 1 or 0.
Few of these flash cells can are grouped together to form a page which is 4 KB in size in most SSDs these days. A page is the smallest entity that is readable/writable in a SSD. Next, group 128 pages together to get a block which is the smallest entity that can be erased. Moving on with the grouping, 1024 of these blocks form a plane. Then these planes are grouped together to form a flash die.
The image below will help explain the concept of grouping further.
For a more detailed analysis of the SSD tech please read here, here and here.
Closer Look at the SSD Now V Series Notebook Bundle
For your viewing pleasure here’s a full unboxing video available in full-HD.
And here are some still shots of the product:
Test System
- Intel Q9450 @ 3.2 GHz
- GIGABYTE EX-38 DS4 F5 BIOS
- GEIL 4 GB ( 2x 2GB ) Dual Channel RAM @ 800 MHz
- Visiontek ATI Radeon HD 4870
- Windows 7 Ultimate x64
- Intel Chipset Device Software Version: 9.1.1.1019
- ATI Catalyst 10.6
Tests
- AS SSD Benchmark
- ATTO Disk Benchmark 2.34
- CrystalDiskMark 3.0
- HDTune 4.50
- HDTach 3.0.4
- PCMark Vantage HDD Test Suite
AS SSD Benchmark
This is a specially designed benchmark for Solid State Drives (SSD). The tool contains four synthetic as well as three practice tests. The synthetic tests determine the sequential and random read and write performance of the SSD. These tests are carried out without use of the operating system caches. In Seq-test the program measures how long it takes to read and write a 1 GB file respectively. In the 4K test the read and write performance for random 4K blocks is determined. The 4K-64-thrd test corresponds to the 4K procedure except that the read and write operations on 64 threads are distributed (typical start of a program).
In the copying test following folders are created: ISO (two large files), programs (typical program folder with many small files) and games (folder of a game with small and large files). These three folders are copied with a simple copy command of the operating system. The cache is turned on for this test. The practice tests show the performance of the SSD with simultaneous read and write operations.
Kingston – Left, Patriot – Right
The Kingston SSD shows better performance in the sequential read and write speeds but suffers in the random read speeds.
- Copy Test
The random read 4K performance advantage for the Patriot SSD translates to a better showing in the real world tests here.
ATTO Disk Benchmark
The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool measures storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize the performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously.
Kingston – Left, Patriot – Right
The Kingston SSD offers faster read speeds across various block sizes.
CrystalDiskMark 3.0
CrystalDiskMark is a HDD benchmark utility for your hard drive that enables you to measure sequential and random read/write speeds. Here are some key features of “CrystalDiskMark”:
- Measure sequential reads/writes speed
- Measure random 512KB, 4KB, 4KB (Queue Depth=32) reads/writes speed
Kingston – Left, Patriot – Right
The Kingston SSD offers a faster sequential read speed than the Patriot SSD but looses out in the write speeds. Also the 512K random test performance of the Kinston SSD is lacking when compared to the Patriot SSD. After a strong showing in the random read performance with 512KB data, the Kingston SSD shows a weakness when playing with 4KB random reads. The read speeds with the 4KB blocks of data are half of that of the Patriot SSD. I think Kingston has some much needed work to be done here to stabilize the performance across the board for this SSD.
HDTune 4.50
HD Tune is a hard disk utility which has the following functions:
- Benchmark: measures the raw performance
- Transfer Rate
- Access Time
- CPU Usage
- Burst Rate
- Random Access test
- Write benchmark
- Hard Disk information which includes partition information, supported features, firmware version, serial number, disk capacity, buffer size, transfer mode
- Hard Disk Health
- S.M.A.R.T. Information (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology)
- Power On Time
- Error scan
- Temperature display
Kingston – Left, Patriot – Right
- Read Test
Both the drives are pretty equally placed in this test.
- Write Test
Here is where things go awry for the Kingston SSD. The write speed seems to be all over the place, even dipping to as low as 25 MB/s. In the end the Kingston SSD is only delivers an average speed of 100 MB/s compared to the Patriot SSD’s 151 MB/s.
- Random Read Test
Things do not get any better for Kingston here. It is still off the pace of the Patriot SSD.
- Random Write Test
The Kingston SSD redeems itself here big time. This test solidifies the need to test with more than one benchmark. Although the Kingston SSD lost by quite a bit in 512KB random write testing in CrystalDiskMark earlier, here it shows some stellar performance with 1 MB blocks and random blocks. The average access time and the average transfer speed for the random test is magnificent when compared to the Patriot SSD.
Although the Kingston SSD wins this round, the difference in write speeds across various blocks may be attributed to the following problem. The benchmark below tests the cache of the SSD. Here we are testing the write speeds of the 64MB cache for the JMicron controller onboard the Kingston SSD. Notice how the write speeds suffer terribly between the 12-18 MB mark. This loss in speed in the cache is what is causing very low write speeds when writing to the flash memory on the drive.
Now notice the write benchmark for the cache on the Patriot SSD.
Notice it is practically the same across the whole of the cache.
HDTachRW 3.0.4
HD Tach is a low level hardware benchmark for random access read/write storage devices such as hard drives, removable drives (ZIP/JAZZ), flash devices, and RAID arrays. HD Tach uses custom device drivers and other low level Windows interfaces to bypass as many layers of software as possible and get as close to the physical performance of the device as possible.
Kingston – Left, Patriot – Right
The write speed woes continue for the Kingston SSD here as it again loses to the Patriot SSD on the write speed test.
PCMark Vantage
PCMark Vantage is a benchmark developed by Futuremark who are famous for 3D Mark. This is not a synthetic benchmark; instead it uses real world scenarios to test all parts of your PC and it outputs results in the form of PCMarks. The user can choose to test individual parts of your PC like we are doing here by testing only the SSD.
The HDD Test suite in PCMark Vantage consists of the following 8 tests:
- HDD 1- Windows Defender
- HDD 2- Game HDD
- HDD 3- Importing pictures
- HDD 4- Windows Vista start-up
- HDD 5- Video editing
- HDD 6- Media Center
- HDD 7- Adding music to Windows Media Player
- HDD 8- Application loading
Testing the SSD as a portable USB hard drive
We also tested the SSD with the included enclosure to gauge its performance when configured in USB mode. Keep in mind that even conventional hard drives are limited to around 30 MB/s by the USB 2.0 interface, so we expect the SSD to do the same. Here are the results from the read and write tests using HDTune 4.50
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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Great review! The video wouldn’t work for me though.. it says it’s a private video! Hmmm? Regardless, a video showing performance impressions would be nice too!