Kingston SSDNow V+ Series 128GB

[Rob Williams]

A couple of weeks ago, Kingston announced a revision to its V+ series of SSDNow drives. In addition to a brand-new controller from Toshiba being utilized, along with Toshiba NAND, the new V+ drives support TRIM right out of the box. This, along with good pricing and excellent performance, make the latest V+ drives well-worth looking out for.

You can read Robert's exhaustive look at Kingston's latest SSD here, and discuss it here!

How will the comparison look between the v+ and the postville 80gb from intel??

I am especially interestet in Real-World- Tests.
Heavy Multitasking, copying files, app-launches.

Can you make a comparison, which one would you prefer?...still the v+?

Thx

David

[Rob Williams]

I'll ping Robert to make sure he sees this question.

I happen to be the one with Intel's SSDs which is the reason Robert hasn't included them in his graphs. I'm having a hard time giving them up given that I've been using them for other purposes (like our motherboard reviews). I'm working to fix that though, so I can get them in his hands, at least the G2 160GB.

Even without them though, he can likely answer your question, so I'll let him try to...

[Kougar]

Welcome to the forums! It's a good question to ask.

Intel's X25-M G2 80GB drive will offer faster small file reads/writes (4KB to 1MB roughly) over the Vertex, but it's best sequential write speed peaks at 80MB/s. Only the 160GB X25 G2 model offers a peak sustained write speed of 100MB/s, so please be aware of this. For purely lots and lots of small file operations, the Intel G2 still takes the edge.

The Vertex Turbo offers peak sequential writes of roughly 185MB/s, and will usually sustain writes well above 100MB/s, which more than balances out the performance in my opinion. It offers better small file operations than the V+, but not quite as high as the Intel G2. At least amongst these three drives, it takes the best of the V+ and G2 and combines them into a good mix of both for an all around good drive. It does not excel at any one task, but it also has no weak points either, unlike the other drives.

The Kingston V+ surprised me in the batch tests as it doesn't offer as strong a performance in IOPS as the other drives. This drive does not offer small file reads/writes as quick as the Vertex or the Intel G2 drives... but it does offer the fastest sequential write speeds I have seen to date. For purely file copying, of the three drives this is the drive to beat as it offers by far the highest burst write speeds and the best sustained write speeds.

Right now, performance is good on all three of these drives and I could recommend any one of them. (Sorry, I know that isn't helpful!) Because of this the best one to recommend would come down to price/GB, and your primary usage for the drive. 80GB is not always enough for Windows + all applications, especially if games are also installed on the drive.

For your questions:

For multitasking, look at my Batch file tests to get a good idea. If I had to extrapolate I don't think the G2 80Gb will do as well as the Vertex or V+ drives because of it's slower write limitation.. the huge write speed of the V+ is what kept it competitive against the Vertex.

For application loads, look at the game load times and Batch Light tests (windows + program loads). Small file ops is where the Vertex and G2 80Gb are best at.

For copying files, the V+ takes the cake, but as most SSDs don't have much space I don't think this is as important a consideration. So if I had to choose between the three drives, the one i like the most would be the Vertex because it takes the best of the G2 and V+, and combines them into an all-around good drive. If you can find the 120GB Vertex for around $300 then it makes recommending it extremely easy.

The performance on the 160GB G2 is better (this is why almost all sites only have 160GB G2 numbers, Intel was being sneaky ), but due to the large capacity the price makes it fairly expensive... and much, much faster drives exist above $400 as well today.