Kingston SSDNow V Series 40GB SSD Review

Crystal DiskMark

Crystal DiskMark is designed to quickly test the performance of your hard drives. Currently, the program allows to measure sequential and random read/write speeds; and allows you to set the number of tests iterations to run. We left the number of tests at 5. When all 5 tests for a given section were run Crystal DiskMark then averages out all 5 numbers to give a result for that section.

Read

As we said earlier, raw performance is one thing but small-size readability is the foundation for a stutter free and peppy felling boot drive. While it is only middle of the pack, if you take a closer look at the numbers you will see that it outperforms the only other sub 128/120GB modern solid state drive (the Corsair P64) we have looked at, so its middle of the pack results are better than we thought they would be. More importantly, when looking at any boot drive in this price range you are usually looking at either last generation solid state drives like the Apex / Titan, or hard disk drives; all of which get easily beaten by the SSDNow in all three areas of read performance.

Write

As expected the write speed has been artificially limited and by the looks of those flattened results it hasn’t just been limited, but severely limited. On the positive side, the size of the data to be written does not appear to matter a whole bunch to the Kingston SSDNow V 40GB. To be honest, its small file write speed is impressive and since the “feel” of your operating system depends a lot on the small read and write speed it should make for a decently fast system.

Random Access Time

To obtain the absolute, most accurate Random access time, h2benchw was used for this benchmark. This benchmark tests how quickly different areas of the drive can be accessed. A low number means that the drive space can be accessed quickly while a high number means that more time is taken trying to access different parts of the drive. To run this program, one must use a DOS prompt and tell it what sections of the test to run. While one could use “h2benchw 1 -english -s -tt "harddisk test" -w test” for example and just run the seek tests, we took the more complete approach and ran the full gamut of tests and then extracted the necessary information from the text file. This is the command line argument we used “h2benchw 1 -a -! -tt "harddisk drivetest" -w drivetest”. This tells the program to write all results in english, save them in drivetest.txt file, do write and read tests and do it all on drive 1 (or the second drive found, with 0 being the OS drive).


As expected the random access numbers this drive posts are impressive. We say that this came as no surprise as this is for all intents a purposes a cut down Intel X25-M generation drive and Intel did boast of improved latency performance of their (then) new gen 2 controller. Intel claims a latency as low as 65 microseconds and our numbers of .07ms do give credence to this boast. In any case, this drive may not be able to read or write as fast as some others, but it can start returning results even faster than any drive we have tested to date.