Kingston SSDNow V Series 128GB SSD Review

[Apoptosis]

Kingston SSDNow V Series 128GB SSD Review

Adding an SSD to a desktop or notebook that uses a traditional hard disk drive is a smart and efficient way to upgrade your PC. The Kingston SSDNow V Series is an entry level SSD that comes with all the software needed to clone your old HDD over to the new SSD. Read on to see if this drive goes down stuttering or if it stands fast and survives our testing.

The Kingston SSDNow V Series should be of interest to consumers due to its price versus value. When we first found out that the Kingston SSDNow V Series was using the JMicron JMF602 controller we thought the drive would suffer from stutters like many of the early SSDs did with the same problematic controller. Even though the benchmarks showed some weird performance spikes and slow 4K random access writes, none of the stuttering issues were seen during our testing period. It seems that the new firmware update that was designed Kingston, J-Micron and Toshiba in the six months leading up to the launch of the V Series paid off. By implementing a firmware workaround for the stutters the performance of the drive did take slight hit...

Article Title: Kingston SSDNow V Series 128GB SSD Review
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1005/1/
Pricing At Time of Print: $219.99 shipped

[HACKhalo2]

I'm glad that SSD's are maturing. I really don't want to get one until later (like 3+ years) because of the newness of them. They are faster and more power efficient then traditional HDD, but they are easily 200+% more expensive per GB. I know that's not a good argument, but in my eyes, like everything computer-related, SSD's need to be refined and perfected further.

I have great hopes for SSD's. In the years to come, they will be the new standard of storage and on the desk of modders to push every bit of performance out of them for next-gen games. Kingston made a great product, now lets see them perfect it.

[gwolfman]

Thanks for the review, I'll steer clear of this one and any "toshiba" re-branded JMicron controller, they still suck. Thanks for including those 4k random write tests Nate!

[FeRaL]

Wow not bad for entry level. I'm definitely going to keep my eyes on these Kingston SSDNow drives as possible upgrades for my wife's and my own laptops once Windows 7 comes out and maybe once a new version comes out that will support TRIM.

Not what I would put in my daily driver but definitely something on the cheap side to look into putting into a laptop.

[leexgx]

get the corsair S128 as its £1 more or less then the re baged jmicron drive

[Methious]

Minor mistake in the SSDNow review, Conclusion page.

"When it comes to storage capacity the OCZ Vertex SSD has a free capacity of 119GB as shown above. This should be enough for many consumers, and in the server and enterprise environments many of these will be run in RAID arrays"

Probably like me, copy and paste error, or to many products causing a minor brain infarction (Brain Fart).

Any reason why the Laptop kit drive wasn't tested in a laptop as opposed to a high end desktop? In a Toshiba Laptop, modern design, I got some pretty alarming results with the SSDNow, close to and sometimes outperformed by the Seagate Momentus.

[Apoptosis]

Minor mistake in the SSDNow review, Conclusion page.

"When it comes to storage capacity the OCZ Vertex SSD has a free capacity of 119GB as shown above. This should be enough for many consumers, and in the server and enterprise environments many of these will be run in RAID arrays"

Probably like me, copy and paste error, or to many products causing a minor brain infarction (Brain Fart).

Any reason why the Laptop kit drive wasn't tested in a laptop as opposed to a high end desktop? In a Toshiba Laptop, modern design, I got some pretty alarming results with the SSDNow, close to and sometimes outperformed by the Seagate Momentus.

Got the error fixed.

As for not testing it in a laptop... The V Series kit we got was a desktop drive:



As for testing in notebooks, the results are less spectacular due to the chipsets used... ICH10R will outperform many mobile chipsets that are popular today like the ICH7M found in 95% of all netbooks.

[Methious]

Yea after I said that I saw it was the desktop kit.

This was a laptop kit, on an ICH9R

Wasn't spectacular but decent for a Value based JMicron 602 reprogrammed controller. Lack of cache hurts it some.

[TalynOne]

Can someone who has this drive do me a favor and run CrystalDiskInfo on it? I have this SSD installed and it reports as SATA/150, and all the benchmarks seem to indicate that the values are below the 150 standard, when running my stock Western Digital Scorpio Blue HDD in the laptop it reports as SATA/300.

[VisualC]

We have the stuttering problem, and it's very heavy. We run a 50 Gb Vmware partition on 64 GB version of this disk and run Win 2003 64 bit with Visual Studio 2008 installed on it. The virtual OS has 4 GB ram. Our host OS has 8 GB ram. Switching between open code windows causes nearly 2 to 5 minutes long stuttering times. We couldn't find any solution to this problem. The situation is unbearable. We're going to change this with a G2 Intel SSD disk.

[Apoptosis]

yeah, it sounds like that workload is a little much for these entry level drives. The firmware fix works on a single OS under normal use.

Sounds like you need something with more muscle and something with cache. The lack of cache in the V Series and the JMicron controller really isn't that great for mutli-taskers or power users.

[FZ1]

We have the stuttering problem, and it's very heavy. We run a 50 Gb Vmware partition on 64 GB version of this disk and run Win 2003 64 bit with Visual Studio 2008 installed on it. The virtual OS has 4 GB ram. Our host OS has 8 GB ram. Switching between open code windows causes nearly 2 to 5 minutes long stuttering times. We couldn't find any solution to this problem. The situation is unbearable. We're going to change this with a G2 Intel SSD disk.

Sounds like you may using the SSD for enterprise use for which an SLC drive is better suited and recommended by the manufacturers.