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Kingston SSDNow V+ (256GB) solid-state drive

Kingston's SSDNow V+ SSD comes with a comprehensive accessory bundle, but its performance is less extraordinary.

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Kingston's SSDNow V+ SSD comes with a comprehensive accessory bundle, but its performance is less extraordinary.

Pros

  • Bundled software and drive caddy

Cons

  • Expensive, performance wasn't spectacular

Bottom Line

The Kingston SSDNow V+'s results aren't bad, but better drives are available for the same kind of money. The inclusion of a drive caddy and software are attractive, but when paying this much we'd rather take the faster drive -- and one capable of juggling files faster.

Would you buy this?

  • Price

    $ 1,169.00 (AUD)

Special Offers

Like Crucial, Kingston is renowned for supplying computer memory, particularly aftermarket RAM modules. The company currently has a range of four SSD series. The Intel-based E series and M series comprise smaller capacity but high-performance drives for power users or servers; while the SSDNow V and SSDNow+ series include more affordable consumer SSD options. The 256GB Kingston SSDNow V+ tested here is even available in 512GB capacity.

Earlier iterations of the Kingston SSDNow V+ used Samsung silicon, but the current crop takes a Toshiba controller and 128MB of cache.

The Kingston SSDNow V+ comes with a comprehensive accessory bundle, complete with a USB 2.0 portable hard drive enclosure and software to aid the backing up of an existing installation.

While the Kingston SSDNow V+ showed read speeds that nudged 200 megabytes per second in both HD Tach and HD Tune Pro, it strangely underperformed by a significant margin in the former, giving read speeds of just 34MBps using longer 32MB data chunks. HD Tune Pro allowed faster writes of 167MBps.

Sequential read and writes in AS SSD were reasonably healthy at 224MBps and 152MBps, but the Kingston SSDNow V+ started to falter when presented with 4kB files: its scores of 13MBps and 9MBps for read and writes of small data pieces were rather slow, and it failed to make headway on a raft of 64 4kB files by turning in results of just 16MBps and 7MBps in this test of command queuing.

These straggling figures were echoed in the CrystalDiskMark test, with the Kingston SSDNow V+ recording 17MBps for both 32x 4kB read and writes. Even the ATTO test for 0.5kB files sagged unacceptably, at 7MBps and 6MBps for read and writes, even if that test’s headline result of 235MBps reads and 174MBps writes may look more impressive.

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Read more on these topics: solid-state drives, SSD, storage, hard drives, kingston

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