Review: Kingston SSD V+100

Disc-based storage, for both desktops and laptops, has never been cheaper than it is right now. It's easy to do some smart shopping and find a 1TB desktop hard drive for between R500 and R600 - it was just a few years ago that a 120GB drive would cost two or three times more.

With storage costs going down, it's almost counterintuitive to consider something like the latest batch of performance-increasing solid-state discs (SSDs). The 128GB Kingston upgrade kit I have on test retails for an eye-watering R3 000. Why settle for a mere 120GB of storage when the same money can get six terabytes?

Put simply: speed. Mechanical hard drives - the kind we've been using for the last 56 years - have spinning platters and moving heads. The laws of physics dictate the inner workings of these devices. Platters and disc heads can only move so fast, before becoming too hot or noisy to operate reliably. Despite that, access times have dropped steadily, with a modern drive having an average access time of around eight milliseconds.

In computer terms, that's an eternity. A 2.0GHz processor runs at two billion cycles per second; waiting 8ms equates to 160-million cycles spent waiting for the hard drive to find information to process.

SSDs cut that access time down to less than a millisecond. Not only that, but the nature of solid-state flash memory means many memory cells can be read simultaneously, dramatically increasing throughput. For this V+100 series drive, Kingston claims read speeds of 230MBps and write speeds of 180MBps.

This proved a problem in actual testing, since my trusty workhorse - a two-year-old Apple Macbook Pro - is saddled with a first-generation serial ATA controller. These are, under ideal conditions, only capable of around 150MBps, but there are some performance overheads to account for.

Newer computers will all boast second generation SATA II controllers, with throughputs of up to 300MBps (and if you're on the bleeding edge, SATA III devices will support 600MBps).

That said, I had been diligent with disc benchmarks before upgrading to the SSD, so there were some older benchmarks with which to compare the Kingston drive.

The standard 200GB 'conventional' hard drive that shipped with my Mac wasn't the world's fastest storage device, but it worked. A quick run of the Xbench benchmarking suite revealed its lacklustre performance: uncached sequential write speeds topped out at 44MBps and 39MBps, for 4KB and 256KB blocks, respectively. Read speeds were 11MBps and 41MBps, respectively.

Random access tests - where platter-based drives perform dismally - returned figures of 0.9MBps and 21MBps write speeds, and 0.4MBps and 18MBps read speeds.

This drive was replaced some time ago by a more modern equivalent. The 200GB drive spun its platters at 5400RPM - but I needed more speed and greater capacity. I opted for a state-of-the-art hybrid drive from Seagate, dubbed Momentus XT.

The Momentus XT has 500GB in conventional platter storage, but an additional 4GB of SSD storage. Using clever drive controllers and algorithms, the XT can move frequently-accessed files to its SSD storage. Net gain: faster access and loading for performance-critical files.

Benchmark results for the XT clocked in at 82MBps and 65MBps for each of the sequential write tests, while the sequential read tests clocked figures of 18MBps and 100MBps.

Disappointingly, the random tests weren't as flattering as I'd hoped, given the mild SSD configuration: write tests were 0.7MBps and 61MBps, and read tests scored 0.8MBps and 32MBps.

Despite the benchmark scores, it's a fantastic system that balances performance, storage and price. In the real world, the performance gains were significant, even on my laptop with its ageing SATA controller. Shops sell the 500GB Momentus XT for around R1 200; a regular 500GB laptop drive costs about half that.

But, as mentioned, this 128GB SSD from Kingston is two-and-a-half times more expensive, for a quarter of the storage. What gives?

Well, the benchmark results speak for themselves. Sequential write tests: 109MBps and 84MBps. Sequential read: 20MBps and 115MBps. The random tests - while not the fastest I've seen for an SSD - were a remarkable improvement compared to the platter drives: 32MBps and 72MBps for write, and 11MBps and 90MBps for read.

As evidenced in the video embedded in this review, the SSD's real-world performance is staggering. Even on the older interface hardware - a real bottleneck for a drive capable of higher speeds - applications load near instantaneously. Even the operating system boots in 21 seconds.

Kingston's drive comes as part of an upgrade kit. Included in the box is an external casing for your old laptop drive, and software for transferring data to the SSD. It's a great 'ready to run' upgrade, but the transfer software is for Windows PCs only: Mac users can just use Time Machine to restore to the new hard drive.

Performance is fantastic, those using older desktop or notebook computers will want to check which SATA controller they're using. Newer hardware will definitely get the biggest benefit from an SSD upgrade.

However, storage space is back at a premium. Unless you're fitting an SSD into a desktop machine, which will have spare ports for extra hard drives, you're going to need to go on a data diet to determine which precious files you need the most, and which ones are kept on external drives.