Kingston SSDNow V100 128GB SSD Review – Hard Drive Comparison and Conclusions

UPGRADING FROM A HARD DRIVE

This paragraph will be the ‘meat and gravy’ of this review simply because most want to know what this SSD will do for them.  We can approach it from the angle that the SSD will last longer, not crash and lose all data at its end life, is lighter, cooler, uses less power which guarantees longer battery life, is more durable and visibly faster.  We could also mention that if a laptop is dropped the chances of the SSD crashing and losing your data are extremely slim compared to the hard drive. The thing we would most like to demonstrate, however, is how the SSD contiues to work under stress in comparison to the hard drive.

To do this, we would like to again draw your attention to the HD Tune Pro BenchMark of the Kingston earlier (left) and compare it to that of our relatively new Samsung SpinPoint F2 1.5TB hard drive (right).

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The most obvious thing people notice when comparing the HDTune Pro Benchmark of the V100 to that of the Samsung is that there is a gradual decline in performance on the hard drive.  Also important though is to recognize that the SSDs access time remains steady at 0.3ms while the hard drive tops out at 15.9ms, which is 53 times slower if you would believe it.  The reasoning for this is pretty interesting.

An SSD consists of NAND Flash memory chips.  When we seek out a piece of information, it is simply returned in one trip as oil would be moved through a pipeline.  A hard drive is a bit different as information is stored on a magnetic platter which is spinning as fast as 10000rpm.  When a request is made, the information must be located and then picked up and retrieved while the disk spins.  As amazing as this truly is, its only logical that the information cannot be retrieved in one trip and the entire process must be started over again.  With larger files, as would be seen in this testing, this puts alot of stress on the hard drive and it simply cannot maintain the performance we would like, thus the resulting performance drop  from 100MB/s to just over 20MB/s.  The same can be said of the access time as it would have been much quicker initially.

Someone once asked how I might describe the difference between a hard drive and a solid state drive to which I responded that it was almost like the computer knew what you were going to do before hitting the enter key.  This is the magic that comes from the almost instant access time of the SSD.

CONCLUSIONS

Kingston Technology has successfully done something that we here at The SSD Review have been suggesting for some time now.  They have manufactured a product that is going to hit a home run for that large number of computer lovers who are looking to upgrade their present system but not sure where to turn.  In fact, they have responded to the biggest concerns plaguing SSD purchase and are introducing a larger capacity SSD available at a very COMPETITIVE PRICE and the Kingston SSDNow V100 series definitely has performance to boot.

During the review, we spoke with Kingston to ask if they were going to try and do something that really hasn’t caught on thusfar which is to mass market their SSD just as we have seen with all other electronics hardware.  They were proud to say that we will definitely be seeing their product either hanging off the shelves of many popular electronics stores or available through their on line ordering system.

They have even gone so far as to tack on a 24/7 tech Support line for those who need help and have included a very comprehensive manual that covers every angle of SSD installation.

So what reason is there to stall on buying your SSD now???

Pg1 – Overview and Simplicity

Pg2 – Test Criteria & Initial Benchmarks

Pg3 – Benchmarks

Pg4 – HDD Comparison and Conclusions