Kingston SSDNow M Series 80GB SATA 2.5 Bundle Kit

Before and After Benchmarks

CrystalDiskMark 2.2 Benchmarking:

To check before and after performance we ran CrystalDiskMark v2.2 to see what gains in performance could be seen. CrystalDiskMark is a small HDD benchmark utility for your hard drive that enables you to rapidly measure sequential and random read/write speeds.

The before and after results were impressive as the sequential read performance had a 4.6x boost and the write performance went up by 2.35x. Very impressive results from a notebook that was purchased in 2006 and the drive swap and cloning took less than 20 minutes to complete. The original drive was a Seagate Momentus 5400.2 120GB hard drive in case you are curious what the drive the before scores are on.

ATTO Disk Benchmark

ATTO is one of the oldest hard drive benchmarks that is still used today. ATTO measures transfers across a specific volume length. It measures raw transfer rates for both reads and writes and places the data into graphs that you can easily interpret. The test was run with the default runs of 0.5kb through 8192kb transfer sizes with the total length being 256mb.

ATTO confirmed the benchmark results seen in CrystalDiskMark v2.2 as the original Seagate Momentus 5400.2 120GB hard drive had a peak write speed of 29.9MB/s and a read speed of 31.3MB/s. The new Kingston SSDNow 80GB SSD has a write speed of 66.5MB/s and a read speed of 134.6MB/s.

Real World Test	Seagate 5400.2 HDD	Kingston SSD	Time Decrease
Windows XP Boot	60.56s	39.47s	35% decrease
Windows XP Shutdown	15.43s	11.74s	24% decrease
Photoshop CS3 Startup	36.02s	3.14s	91% decrease
Cricut Startup	46.26s	24.99s	45% decrease

Synthetic benchmark numbers only get you so far, so we also ran some real world benchmarks to see just how much improvement would be seen by a number of common tasks. The bootup and shutdown times were ~1.5x faster on the SSD. We calculated bootup times from the second the power button was pressed to when the wireless internet connection was made. Firing up Adobe Photoshop CS3 showed a 12x difference between the two systems the very first time it was opened. Lastly, we fired up the popular scrapbooking software program Cricut Design Studio and found that the fonts and application loaded nearly twice as fast with the new SSD. Not bad performance improvements on a notebook from 2006 with a three year old Windows XP installation!

By changing the boot order to having the Kingston SSD being the first boot device the system was able to load Windows XP to the desktop and connect to the internet in under 30 seconds, which is impressive. These are very significant performance improvements that are easy to reach thanks to the Kingston SSDNow Bundle. If we had to go back and do it all over again, we would have cleaned up the original drive a bit more and run the defragment tool just before we cloned the drive.