Product Listing

Kingston SSDNow V+ Series 64GB SSD (Updated!)

By Vijay Anand - 18 Dec 2009

Stress Testing & Conclusion

Performance after Stress Testing

A common question that has been raised time and time again is how much performance users stand to lose after frequent usage of their SSD - especially considering older drives that don't yet have any self trimming or self healing features. While the Samsung controller used on this Kingston SSDNow V+ series supports this function, it won't be effective till a newer firmware is publicly released later as relayed by Kingston. Taking this opportunity, we'll show you what kind of performance you can expect to get out of this drive after extended usage without self trimming features active.

Given the torturous testing we put the SSD drives in our testing phase where we run an extended phase of Iometer testing, we figure that's more than adequate to get all the flash cells used up at least once - thus artificially invoking a heavily used state of the drive. Instead of running through all the test results, we focused upon HD Tune, one of the more sensitive benchmarks
that was able to relay the outcome.

First up is the sequential read test where we compare the performance before and after the stress test. Though read performance was affected, it was less than 10% in difference (235.7MB/s versus 214.4MB/s average transfer rate).

Write performance is what you should be most concerned about since this is where the drive needs to perform a lot more operations just to delete pre-occupied flash cells before writing new data. We'll talk about the details of these operations and why the performance loss in a dedicated article later, but for now, just know that the write performance gets hit most after the drive is heavily used. Comparing the average sequential read performance, this drive loses more than 30% performance.

This in fact, is actually not too bad considering the Indilinx controller based drives lose a whole lot more. However those drives will soon get self trimming features just like this Kingston drive and with that in place, performance should be restored eventually in all of these drives. Even without built-in self trimming features, the Indilinx based drives have an upper hand with their Wiper utility. This tool restores the drive's performance without harming the data on board and does its 'magic' in a matter of minutes.

Closing Remarks

The Kingston SSDNow V+ series is a very promising drive and its sequential read/write performance in our tests was really swell. However upon closer securitization of varying workloads, especially those involving random writes and more taxing workloads, the new Kingston drive doesn't fare too well in those areas.

However, the Kingston V+ has a very enticing proposition thanks to its great price point of about US$190 or less than S$350 locally in Singapore. Quite frankly, for a 64GB SSD drive based on MLC flash memory with a more than decent overall performance, it's a steal. No surprise why it snagged our Most Value for Money award winner.

If you're in the market for a better rounded drive that excels in both the read and write performance aspects in a variety of tasks, the Patriot Torqx and sometimes the Intel X25-M are still the better options. They are unfortunately limited in availability locally unlike Kingston products. For those who aren't too demanding and are seeking the best value option, the Kingston SSDNow V+ is a very ideal drive for your consideration.

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