Kingston SSDNow V+200 120GB SSD Review

Kingston V+200 – Real World Tests

One of the most common operations performed on a PC is moving/copying files. Using a free application called Teracopy, we copied large numbers of two file types from one folder to another on the same drive. Teracopy allows us to objectively measure the time of transfer and using the same drive prevents other devices from tainting the outcome. The operation requires the drive to perform both sustained read and writes simultaneously. The first set of files is a 5GB collection of JPG’s of variable size and compression levels with a few movie (.MOV) files thrown in for good measure since most cameras now take video as well as stills. The second is a collection of MP3 files of various sizes which totals 5GB collectively. These file types were chosen due to their wide use and mixture of file sizes and compression levels.

Install Results: The V+200 falls near the bottom in terms of time, some 30 seconds slower than the better performing drives. This adroitly illustrates the weakness of asynchronous NAND.

We also timed the installation of a few rather lengthy applications/suites as app installs is something everyone does and waiting for completion can be a drag. We used Adobe Dreamweaver CS5, Microsoft Office 2010 Professional and Futuremark’s 3DMark Vantage (v1.102.1901) as our test subjects with all install settings at default. Both were installed from an installer located on the target drive itself as installing from another drive, especially an optical drive, would cause a bottle-neck that would corrupt the results. The timing for these had to be done via stopwatch so there should be about a half second +/- error margin. Again, with the source and target drives being the same, concurrent read/write activity is required.

Install Results: Again, at the bottom of the list of scores although only a handful of seconds slower on the application installs.

Windows Boot Times

Windows start up/shutdown time is always something people are interested in and we haven’t done it in a while because there was little variation with the majority of the SSDs. We recently began using an application called BootRacer to objectively measure the startup times of the drives. All of the instances of Windows were identical and freshly installed with only the video driver installed.

Test Results: The boot score for time to logon was one second of the best time in our limited comparison but the time to desktop was one second slower than the worst time in the comparison.

We’ll wrap this with a look at the total drive capacity and our final thoughts.