Kingston 96GB SSDNow V+100 performance evaluation
Conclusion
As our MrK concluded last year and we also concluded in our evaluation of the 128GB version a few months ago, 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 nearly 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 and now balanced out in this newer Kingston “+” drive.
We have watched SSD technology also get slowly cheaper over time and it is much more accessible to the regular consumer and not just for enthusiasts. We expect it will still take at least a couple of years to reach the break-through $1-per-gigabyte pricing regularly. For this to happen, it will take mass consumer and OEM acceptance and there is still huge room for growth in this regard. For now, the Kingston SSDNow V+100 series offers a good bang-for-buck at regular pricing and we have noted that it was on sale last week (at the time of writing this evaluation) at NewEgg and at Buy.com with its mail-in-rebate rebate bringing its final costs down close to the now amazing $1-per-gigabyte value.
The 96GB Kingston SSDNow V+100 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 nor “+” series) 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 “plus” drive still retains the great characteristics which make it incredibly faster than a mechanical hard drive while offering a lot more for the regular or corporate user.
It is absolutely 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. It is a matter of valuing ones time compared to what one spends on a relatively small-capacity drive; one has to choose their games and applications to put on the SSD wisely – Less than 80GB after the OS installation is not a lot of space and you can only have a few modern games on your SSD at any one time. Most SSD gamers will constantly be installing new games and uninstalling them after playing them to make room for even newer games.
I still would liked to see Kingston offer a secure erase tool for SSDs – or at least instructions; in every other respect, it is a well-rounded SSD bundle with a superb balance of performance to price. Since the PC that this editor uses for benching has well over 450GB of just games installed, it is not practical to use a 96GB SSD 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.
As our next SSD project, we are going to be using our older Kingston SSDNow V100 128GB solid-state drive for a complete notebook “makeover”. We feel that our 2.0 GHz mobile dual-core Athlon X2 is still a capable platform with a 8200M mobile GeForce and it is mostly held back by it’s slow HD and only 2GB of RAM running on Vista 32. We will easily replace the 250GB 5400 rpm drive that is pre-installed with the 128GB Kingston SSD and double the RAM capacity to 4GB. As we will then have more system RAM than a 32-bit OS can address, we will take our free upgrade to 64-bit Vista. Since we do ninety percent of our work on our notebook, we expect a world of difference in every way and we will soon have a “Part three” to our ongoing SSD vs. HDD evaluations. 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 and shutdown is noticeably quicker!
- Kingston’s SSDNow V100 96GB drive has improved in every way over the previous 100 series and it is faster in many practical ways over the 128GB version.
- Kingston’s 96GB SSD offers great performance for its regular price and it has been recently been found on sale for nearly $1 a GB after mail-in rebate.
- TRIM support and garbage collection keeps your drive “like new”.
- Excellent bundle for notebook or desktop in a single package makes setting up your SSD a breeze and less complex than choosing the bundle for the 128GB (non +) series.
- 3-year warranty and 24/7 Kingston support stand it out from the “SSD crowd”
Cons –
- Price per GB is very high compared to mechanical hard drives.
- Limited storage compared to HDDs
- 96GB is too small for a hardcore gamer; 128GB makes a difference!
The 96GB Kingston SSDNow V+100 still deserves the ABT Editor’s Choice award. Although it is not especially a drive for gamers because of low-capacity, there is plenty of room for Windows, applications and perhaps 5 or 6 of your favorite games. It is also highly recommended as a time and frustration saver in starting up and shutting down Windows.
We did not set out especially to evaluate our 500GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 drives. However, they continue to performe admirably and demonstrate improvements in every way over the 7200.10 drives that we have been depending on for over two and one-half years. If we were giving Seagate an award, they would deserve our “Great Value” award! We even filled our drives to capacity as we tested over 70 games for our upcoming 3D Vision evaluation, and they still perform as they did months ago when they were less than half-filled!
We also want to give a big congratulations to the winners of our Freedom Contest on July 4th! Look on our ABT forum for the announcement of the grand prize winner of this same 96GB SSDnow V+ series that we just evaluated; the Kingston prizes are brand new from Kingston, and you can also congratulate the runner up who just won a 32GB Kingston Flash drive.
It pays in every way to keep up with ABT and the best way is to follow us on our ABT forum. You can be part of great discussions; learn about everything tech-related including breaking news and “inside” information and perhaps contribute and even win prizes in our giveaways. Our muvee give-away of Reveal 8 is ongoing and it is SO EASY to enter and win a free retail key valued at $80 for the easiest to use video-sharing software that is available anywhere – there really is no learning curve!
Mark Poppin
ABT Senior Editor
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