Kingston 96GB SSDNow V+100 performance evaluation

Contents

Here is the retail box that you would buy with the desktop upgrade kit. As you can see the contents are well-packed for transport safely to your door. Inside the box, the precious contents are well-protected by the plastic shell. The SSD is rather tough anyway and Kingston even had a contest to show how durable they are.

Kingston calls the SSDNow v+100, “the Ultimate Upgrade!” We shall see. We also note the 24/7 promised tech service and the 3-year warranty are right on the box as well as the advantages of the product as this SSD will also be featured in retail brick and mortar stores as well as online.

Here are the contents; the 2.5″ SSD, the 3.5″ brackets and screws, the SATA data cable, the SATA power cable, the case and the cloning software CD and the installation manual.

Here is the SSD’s other side and we see the standard connections.

As you can see the physical look and dimensions of both SSDs are the same.

As you can see, our SSD has the standard SATA power and data connectors.  Below is Thermaltake’s BlackXduet USB and eSATA hard drive dock which proved very useful in reading data from internal drives that are now accessed as external drives. Look for the review published by Leon Hyman.

We set up Windows 7 64-bit on one of our Seagate 500GB 7200.12 Barracuda hard drives along with six fairly new games, favorite applications and benching tools. We put about 89GB or so of data on our HDD so that we would not have any issues cloning the HDD to the SSD.  We made sure to leave room for additional files and applications to its maximum of about 80GB after the OS install. We used the supplied Acronis cloning software on the Kingston-supplied CD to make a exact copy of our HDD and we were able to then boot from either drive. The cloning software is very fast and very easy to use. However, before we get to the benching, let’s recap the SSD and what makes it unique from mechanical drives.

One mistake many enthusiasts make is to think of a SSD like a mechanical HDD. Instead, think of it as a giant flash drive with the strengths and weaknesses inherent to that kind of storage. MrK’s article on the previous series of Kingston SSDNow is extraordinarily well-written and detailed, and it would be good to review it if you are not familar with Solid-State storage. Also, here is his article on the faster but much more expensive Patriot TorqX 236 GB SSD which goes into even more detail. MrK explains the strengths and weaknesses of the SSD. Instead of repeating his information, this section will be the briefiest of recaps and we will focus instead on secure erase and performance degradation.

Because of the way data is written to and erased from a SSD, the write speeds will go down as more and more data is written to it. There is a definite need for TRIM and other garbage collection. When Windows 7 identifies the drive as a SSD, it enables the TRIM command for the drive when files are deleted from it. The TRIM command tells the SSD controller to delete the pages on the NAND flash block when the user deletes the data. The entire block containing the data is copied into the memory cache and then the block is erased. After this procedure, the data without the user-deleted part is rewritten back to the block from the memory cache. This results in longer delete times, but allows the write performance to remain nearly like-new.

Secure Erase and Performance Degradation

A secure erase restores your drive to a like-new state where each cell is effectively zeroed out. So its performance would be like-new also as if it was fresh out of the box. Simply cloning over from an HDD to SSD would not zero out the cells like a secure erase would. This is because you’re not guaranteed to be writing over the same cells. In a clone, information is just being transferred over, not like erasing a cell first and then writing to it. On a good SSD such as Kingston’s SSDNow v100 series, there is simply no need to secure erase periodically, but whenever you format or re-image your drive, it’s a great idea.

This is perhaps the most detailed yet simplified step-by-step way to secure erase your SSD – something you must do (for safety) if you ever sell it:

http://www.markc.me.uk/MarkC/Blog/Entries/2009/8/13_Erasing_an_SSD.html

Be aware that your SSD’s BIOS may have some sort of mechanism that prevents the secure erase tool from detecting the SSD for secure erase. We had no such issues with our Kingston drive but we wish that they had included a secure erase tool with the drive.

Note on testing.

We began our testing with our SSD in a brand-new state as delivered by Kingston. We also began with two brand-new identical Seagate 500GB HDDs which are the 12th generation of their 7200 rpm desktop series. We installed Windows 7 64-bit operating system and a bit less than 80 GB of programs, applications and games. Next, we used the Acronis Cloning software included on the included Kingston CD to effortlessly copy in just a few minutes the entire hard drive image to the Kingston SSD which now became a bootable drive. For certain write tests, all of the data had to be erased on the SSD and we also ran these same tests on a formatted HDD with no operating system installed. Generally, all of our testing was done with the SSD in a used condition and the drive was not erased (as many benchers do) before each bench that is run or after a single day of normal day-to-day use.

Although we have evaluation copies of some of the SW we tested, we used the freeware or shareware version if there was a choice. There are some remarkable tools available for testing hard disk and solid-state drive performance and all of the ones that we used are considered excellent.

About Kingston Digital, Inc.

Kingston Digital, Inc. (“KDI”) is the Flash memory affiliate of Kingston Technology Company, Inc., the world’s largest independent manufacturer of memory products. Established in 2008, KDI is headquartered in Fountain Valley, California, USA. For more information, please visit www.kingston.com.