Kingston UV500 SATA SSD Review – Self-Encrypting Drive

By Nathan Kirsch

Anvil Storage Utilities

Anvil Storage Utilities 1.1.0

Along with the move to a new platform, we decided to make a change in one of the benchmarks. There’s a relatively new benchmark called Anvil Storage Utilities that is in beta but close to production. It’s a very powerful tool that measures performance through a variety of tests which can be customized. Since some of the tests more or less duplicate what we get from other benchmarks we use already, we decided to use the IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) testing on 4kb file sizes at a queue depth of 1, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 and 128. IOPS performance is something SSD makers tout quite a bit but we generally don’t do a lot of IOPS testing because frankly a lot of users can’t relate to IOPS metrics as well and it tends to be more meaningful to the enterprise/server crowd. Still, it is another performance indicator with relevance and while some drives post good MB/s numbers, their IOPS scores aren’t always commensurate which this test will prove out.

Anvil SSD Benchmark with 100% Compression (incompressible data):

UV500 120GB

UV500 480GB

UV500 960GB

UV500 1920GB

Benchmark Results: The Anvil SSD Benchmark showed that with 100% compression (incompressible data) has the UV500 120GB drive coming in at 3,125 points and then the larger 480GB, 960GB and 1920GB drives scored above 4,200. This is because the sequential and Random 4K write performance is better on the larger drives. The Kingston UV500 480GB drive had the best score and costs the least per GB, so it’s certainly looking like it’s be best bang for the buck in this series.