Kingston V+ 100 96GB SSD Review

Kingston V+ 100 96GB Specifications:

• Model Name: Kingston SVP100S2/96G
• Sequential Read Throughput: 230 MB/s
• Sequential Write Throughput: 180 MB/s
• Memory Type: MLC
• Interface: SATA II
• MTBF: 1,000,000 hours
• Advertised power consumption (idle): 0.05W
• Advertised power consmption (active): 3.6W
• 3-year parts and labor warranty
• MSRP: $199

Synthetic performance
As usual we ran Crystal Disk Mark 3.0 to get an impression of synthetic performance. Sequential read and write speeds are close to specifications. 4K read and write performance look very good, while performance at higher queue depths doesn’t look so good when compared to the Crucial M4 and OCZ Vertex 3 we reviewed recently.

Real world performance
To find out how the Kingston V+ 100 performs in a real world setting we build it in to our Toshiba C660 Sandy Bridge Notebook with Core i5 CPU and used the following SSDs for comparison:

• Intel X25m 80GB SSD, a previous generation SATA II SSD.
• Crucial M4 128GB, a fast SATA III SSD.
• Vertex 3 120GB, another fast SATA III SSD.

After a clean install of Windows 7 Microsoft’s Office 2010 Suite, Adobe Photoshop CS5 and the game Need for Speed Shift were installed. The times were added together and are shown in the chart.

Kingston does very well here. It clearly outperforms the Intel X25-M and even comes close to the SATA III SSDs.

Next we measured how fast these drives boot Windows 7 with the utility Boot Timer.

We don’t know how Kingston does it but the V+ 100 manages to outperform the more expensive  SATA III SSDs. On average the system booted in 9.9 seconds.

To get an accurate indication of file copy performance two folders were copied. The first folder contained many small program files, the second folder contained larger media files.

This is where SATA III SSDs can clearly show their muscles. The Kingston V+ 100 was more than 30 seconds slower. Still it was faster than Intel X25-M.

To get an impression of application launching performance we opened up a large tiff image and Adobe Photoshop CS4 64 bit together. Next was Microsoft Word and a large document containing text and images. After that the game Need for Speed was started and the time it took to load the first level was measured.

Again the Kingston V+ 100 does very well, opening Photoshop faster than the Crucial M4 and much faster than the Intel X25-M.

Next, we ran three different tests to measure the multi-tasking performance of the SSD. The first was opening a larger JPEG image with Photoshop while a virus scan was running in the background. The displayed time is the time it took to open the jpg image and Photoshop. The second multitask test involved decompressing a large RAR file with a virus scan simultaneously. The time displayed is the time it took to complete both jobs. The last multi-tasking test consisted of three tasks ran simultaneously: a folder was copied, a RAR file extracted and a folder was scanned. The time displayed in the graph is the time it took to complete all three jobs.

Even in multi-tasking situations the Kingston V+ 100 doesn’t disappoint. It’s a little slower than the SATA III SSD but it’s still performing fine. It performs approximately the same as Intel X25-M.