Kingston SSDNow V Series 40GB SSD Review

Performance in an "Upgraded" System

Since Kingston markets this particular drive as a "desktop upgrade" version, we wanted to see how it would improve overall system load times when used as a boot drive on an older system.

While our usual boot up test is run on a fairly heavy duty system with a moderately fragmented OS we thought we would really put this drive to the test and see exactly what it is made of. To this end we used our oldest running system which consists of a dual core socket 939 AMD X2 4400+ with 2GB of Ram. This system has been running for over 3 years now and has not been defragmented in well over a year and a half. To be honest we would be surprised if there is two files which are not fragmented on it. The only thing which has been upgraded on this system is the hard drive which is a relatively new 640GB WD Black (to be precise it is the same one used in these tests)

XP Start Up

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Well that certainly puts things into perspective, doesn't it? Darn near 30 seconds difference between the Kingston and its nearest competitor certainly is impressive, especially considering said competitor is one of the better HDDs on the market. The fact that this down right inexpensive SSD can put fast hard drives' boot time to shame really does show how much of a performance boost it can give older systems when used like its name states: as a desktop upgrade kit. The secret to this drive's success is the fact that its latency is not only low but is the same throughout the entire drive and it doesn’t care how fragmented your OS is; while the Black Edition (or any HDD for that matter) has to slow down and “hunt” for files over the entirety of its platters.

Adobe CS3 Load Time (Older System)

This time it was Adobe’s turn to test the mettle of the Kingston drive on a less beefy system. This is what we found out.


While the difference was not as significant with the Adobe test as it was with the boot times, the difference is still eye-opening. Given the price point of this “boot drive” we feel that it is easily one of the cheapest, easiest and BEST upgrades you can do to an older system to breath new life into it.