Kingston 96GB SSDNow V+100 performance evaluation

Real World Testing

CustomPC Benchmark

CustomPC benchmark use widely available open-source applications to carry out the tasks that most of us perform on a regular basis. There are three tests, each of which measure different aspects of a PC’s performance. These tests themselves are not synthetic benchmarks but instead they use real world image, video and multi-tasking tasks to test the performance of your computer. We are looking to see if tasks are faster on the SSD than the HDD.

The tests are:

• GIMP Image Editing
• H.264 Video Encoding
• Multi-tasking

As usual we test with the Seagate 500GB HDD first.

Now the same test is repeated on the SSD.

No difference in image editing speed. Let’s copy a video file, first on the HDD.

Let’s copy a video file on the SSD.

Video encoding has completed about 6 seconds faster on the SSD – 329 seconds on the HDD and 323 on the SSD. Not a lot of difference, so let’s check out our final test, multi-tasking.

Now on to Multi-tasking with the SSD test.

Now let’s do the all in one test with the 96GB version.

Both SSDs are one to three seconds faster than the HDD and there is really only slight variation overall. Now we will go to a very practical test of something we all do, file copying.

File Copy: Crysis Warhead

In this test we are using MrK’s method of installing the Crysis Warhead game to the drive being benchmarked. Then that game folder is copied to another folder on the same drive using Microsoft’s Robocopy GUI and the time taken is noted. This real world benchmark tests both the read and the write speeds of the drive at the same time. MrK and I both choose Crysis Warhead for this purpose as this game has a lot of files of various sizes. This should test the hard disk transfer speeds across vast sizes of files and is indeed a real world scenario.

The game was patched with the 1.1 and 1.1 hotfix patch which introduces the 64-bit executable. The test is performed 3 times and the results averaged. The HDD took 2 minutes and 47 seconds on average to copy 5.63GB.

The 128GB SDD took 1 minutes and 51 seconds on average to copy 5.83GB. The 96GB SSD only took 1 minute and 18 seconds!!

Now we test the 96GB SSD on the same file copy – note the speed is higher in the GUI than the 128GB version.

Need we say more? The 96GB SSD was even quicker at 1 minute and 18 seconds than the 128GB SSD which already saves nearly one minute over the mechanical drive; nearly three minutes for the HDD to copy the same files that the SSD does in way less than half the time!

We have already seen very slight improvements in video editing and multi-tasking when the drives are accessed and huge gains in copying big files, but will it also translate to improved performance in gaming? We will look at gaming load times now that we are finished with the synthetic and real world benchmarks.