The Kingston SSDNow V200 is a 7mm thick, 2.5-inch SSD available in capacities of 64GB, 128GB and 256GB. This SATA 3.0 (6Gb/s) SSD has advertised sequential speeds of up to 260MB/s read and 100MB/s write for the 64GB capacity, 300MB/s read and 190MB/s write for the 128GB capacity and 300MB/s read and 230MB/s write for the 256GB capacity.

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The V200 is of a particular interest to modern laptop users because many new notebooks and most "Ultrabooks" are designed with a thin chassis that cannot hold a standard 2.5-inch SSD with a thickness of 9.5mm. Those new laptops and Ultrabooks require thinner 7mm SSDs like the V200.

[click to view image]The "desktop bundle kit" includes the SSD, cloning software, DVD with step-by-step installation video, cables (SATA data and power), and 3.5-inch hard-drive mounting brackets and hardware.

The "notebook upgrade kit" (contents pictured to the right) includes the SSD and spacer for notebooks that take a standard 9.5mm SSD, DVD with step-by-step installation video, Acronis True Image cloning software and a 2.5-inch external enclosure for easy OS and data transfer from your laptop's HDD to the new SSD during cloning.

[click to view image]I Have A Need ... A Need For Speed!

As previously mentioned, Kingston originally released the SSDNow V200 in November 2011. Shortly after its launch, Kingston received isolated reports (some of those reports coming from discussion forum members right here at NotebookReview) of performance degradation specific to write speeds on the 64GB and 128GB capacities. Kingston's engineering teams began investigating and were able to confirm those reports. Kingston's official explanation for the slow write speed of the V200 is as follows: 

"Excessive nonuser initiated OS host writes (temp files, log files, etc.) would bog down the controller, and steady-state write performance would slow down below the stated specifications. Customers would not typically experience the slowdown but repeated benchmarking would exacerbate it."

In other words, typical background activities common to a Windows environment would gradually impact the SSD's controller chip and drop the write speed down to a fraction of the advertised speed. In some cases, that performance drop made the V200 as slow (or slower) than a bargain-priced 5400rpm hard drive ... particularly when tested with benchmarking software to confirm the speed of the drive.

Kingston therefore put the drive production on hold and stopped shipping the V200 pending a fix. Now, after months of working exhaustively with its technology partners to solve this issue, Kingston is ready to resume shipment of the V200 SSD once again.

[click to view image]The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same

So, did Kingston change the flash controller and core components in the new V200? Nope. It still uses a JMicron 668 Controller and Toshiba 24nm 3KP/E Cycle MLC NAND flash. In fact, the remedy for the slow performance was as simple as a firmware update.

The solution to the V200's problem is a firmware upgrade that optimizes 4K random writes while restoring sequential read and write performance. In addition, Kingston reports the firmware upgrade provides a "significant boost to random write performance" over the original drive.

Some of our discussion forum members will recall that a beta version of a firmware update for the V200 was leaked online several months ago and that firmware update failed the fix the slow speed of the V200 SSD. The leaked firmware was never meant for public distribution and was a work in progress. Thankfully, as our performance tests of the new V200 show later in this review, the final firmware update indeed solves the speed issues that plagued the original V200.

All Kingston SSDNow V200 drives now shipping from the factory have the new firmware in place. Current owners with the old V200 drives will be able to download the new firmware update from the Kingston support website. It is important to note the 256GB capacity was not affected by the write performance degradation and continues to ship with its original firmware.

Now let's take a look at the performance of the updated V200 ...

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Performance: SSDThen and SSDNow

Before we jump right into the performance benchmarks of the new Kingston SSDNow V200, let's take a quick look at the performance of last year's V200 with the original firmware. If you took your old V200 straight out of the package and used it as a second drive (a "D" drive) in a desktop or a large desktop-replacement notebook then you typically only saw a modest drop in performance over a period of time as you wrote and deleted new files to the drive.

[click to view image]As you can see in the CrystalDiskMark test results to the right, the old V200 delivered read speeds close to 220MB/s and write speeds of around 117MB/s as a second drive in a notebook after a few months of regularly recording and deleting files to the drive as a secondary storage disk. This isn't "terrible" compared to the average laptop hard drive that is lucky to get up to 100MB/s read and write, but it isn't particularly fast for a SSD.

Of course, as we mentioned earlier, the real problem with the old V200 was the performance degradation over time when the drive was used as a primary boot drive ("C" drive). Not only did the write speeds drop after a few weeks of use thanks to all of the background OS host writes, but the controller became even more bogged down after months of prolonged use reading and writing files combined with OS host writes resulting in a slow down to both the read and write performance. The CrystalDiskMark results below aren't pretty.

The real question is, "Can the new firmware prevent a performance drop that looks this bad?" Well, we're happy to report that our initial lab tests suggest the new firmware dramatically improves the performance of the V200 and the result is both read and write speeds that are as good or BETTER than the advertised specs.

The CrystalDiskMark and ATTO benchmark tests below show the performance of the new V200 as a boot drive ("C" drive) after more than 24 hours of serious use and abuse -- writing, reading, and deleting hundreds of GB worth of data over and over again in our lab while repeatedly benchmarking the drive. We decided to show the ATTO benchmark here as well since it tends to be a little "nicer" about showing the absolute fastest read speed of the drive.

According to CrystalDiskMark the new V200 delivers a top sustained read speed of roughly 273MB/s and a write speed of 211MB/s ... 27MB/s slower read speed than advertised and 21MB/s faster write speed than advertised. ATTO reports the read speed at roughly 307MB/s and the write speed at 209MB/s ... both faster than advertised speeds!