Kingston SSDNow V Series 40GB SSD Review

XP Start Up

When it comes to hard drive performance there is one area that even the most oblivious user notices: how long it takes to load the Operating System. For our tests the clock starts as soon as the system “beeps” and stops when our Anti-Virus splash screen disappears. While all the other tests were run with a streamlined XP image this particular image is the test bed's “day to day” OS and it has accumulated a lot of crud over the months from installs and removals. We chose the Anti-Virus splash screen as our finish line as it is the last program to be loaded on start up.


When it comes to boot time, this drive does perform admirably well. While not in the same league as other companies' flagship models, it did easily outperform ALL hard drives tested to date. This includes the amazing 2TB Western Digital Black and the venerable 300GB Western Digital VelociRaptor. Not to shabby considering this drive costs a heck of a lot less than either of those hard drives.

Adobe CS3 Load Time

Photoshop is a notoriously slow loading program under the best of circumstances, but when you add in a bunch of extra brushes and the such you get a really great torture test which can bring even the best of the best to their knees. Let’s see how our review unit faired in the Adobe crucible!


As with boot times, the performance of the Kingston SSDNow V series 40GB is not bad at all in this test. Its powerful read speeds really do help “hide” its less than stellar writes. To be honest, these tests are mainly about small read and write performance so it is playing to this drive's strengths. Then again, if you are designing a value orientated (AKA “budget”) Solid State Drive you could do a lot worse than making its strong points small-sized reads and writes. After all, its tests like this one (and boot time) which most people use to measure how “powerful” or “fast” their system is.