Reviews - Kingston SSDNow V+100 96GB SSD review

[HEXUS]

What happens when you put an SSD into a four-year-old laptop?

Read more.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I want an SSD and I haz no moneyz!!



The Moose is collecting donations. Perhaps if I find a few thousand pennies I can buy one!

[kalniel]

Yup SSDs are nice

What's the actual usable capacity of the 96GB drive?

[Sprite]

Nice review, I'm surprised that a 3w reduction in power gives you that much extra battery life though.

It would have been nice if you could have compared it to another SSD but I suppose that wasn't the aim of the review.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Yup SSDs are nice

As Rimmer would say "Gimboid Git!!"

What's the actual usable capacity of the 96GB drive?

Equal or less than 96GB!!

[Jay]

how can this be?....

The Good

Priced close to £1-per-GB

The Bad

£105 still feels like a lot of money for 96GB

[kalniel]

Equal or less than 96GB!!

You mean we might have the first ever MLC drive with no over-provisioning?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

You mean we might have the first ever MLC drive with no over-provisioning?

Maybe that is why it is so cheap??

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Formatted volume is 89GB:

http://www.expertreviews.co.uk/inter...specifications

[Lanky123]

If you are upgrading an old laptop like this is it also pretty much a necessity to upgrade to Windows 7 for TRIM support? I've been thinking of doing exactly this for a while now but when I add the cost of Windows 7 as well (even the student deal) it becomes a bit less attractive. Is the garbage collection in older operating systems (Vista in this case) as effective as TRIM?

[jim]

Formatted volume is 89GB:

http://www.expertreviews.co.uk/inter...specifications

Same as what it says on page 2 of the Hexus review

[kalniel]

If you are upgrading an old laptop like this is it also pretty much a necessity to upgrade to Windows 7 for TRIM support? I've been thinking of doing exactly this for a while now but when I add the cost of Windows 7 as well (even the student deal) it becomes a bit less attractive. Is the garbage collection in older operating systems (Vista in this case) as effective as TRIM?

With this particular drive, yes. It's got very aggressive garbage collection which really reduces the need for TRIM. Possibly the reason Apple use them as well.

[Agent]

I don't get the purpose of this 'review'. It's effectively saying "put an SSD in a laptop and it's faster" with some figures to back it up. Of course it's going to be faster, it's a SSD! (you'd be hard pressed to find one slower)

For the first time in ages we have a drive which is close to £1 for a gig, and has a decent amount of storage space for a OS install without needing to worry too much, and we don't get one single benchmark against another SSD drive.

Where is the comparison to Sandforce drives?
Where is the comparison to Intels?
Where is the comparison to the Crucial C300?

For example: "Kingston's 96GB SSDNow V+100 might not be the quickest or most capacious SSD on the market" and "Extreme users should look elsewhere for benchmark-busting performance"
How do you know? Where are the benchmarks apart from against a mechanical drive? Are you going off the maximum theoretical values given? Did you compare it to previous drive benchmarks and find them comparable? If so, say that and link them.

Another qualm: "make it an excellent upgrade to existing SATA 3Gbps systems." Isn't this an excellent upgrade to 6Gbps systems then? 'True' 6Gbps drives are in a higher price bracket for the most part, so why have you singled out the 3Gbps systems here?


There was a review of the 128GB version over here, but that was back in Feb last year and there has been some new SSDs in the market since then.
From that review: "Forgetting about synthetics for a moment, there's nothing of note to separate the three premium SSDs in the pragmatic tests."
So if it couldn't be separated from other premium SSDs a year ago and it can now, what separates it? With no benchmarks to show this, I'm left none the wiser....

This should be labelled as "How much of a difference does a SSD make to a laptop?". It is not a review of the drive as claimed.

[Parm]

Agent, thanks for the feedback, it's always appreciated and taken onboard.

The idea behind this review was to show that a relatively-affordable SSD can offer a huge performance boost to older hard-disk-based systems. Stating the obvious, perhaps, but it's useful information for an inexperienced PC user and we found the real-world numbers interesting - particularly battery life.

But as always, we do our best to give our readers what they want, so we've secure erased the Kingston drive, benched it in our Sandy Bridge test system and compared it with a good selection of other SSDs. The additional results are now available on pages six and seven of the review.

[mikerr]

I for one welcome a review comparing a real world scenario
i.e. moving from old hard drive to SSD

Many reviews concentrate on one SSD being 10% faster than another, glossing over the fact that all SSDs are 4-5x faster than the fastest conventional HDDs.

Compared with other SSDs the kingston V+ is pretty poor, but it is cheap, and doesn't need TRIM, and does blow any spinning HDD out of the water.

[c.ruel]

I thought this was a really clever idea for a review and really liked it! Surprised that some didn't like it. Although I have to admit I read it once the synthetic benchmarks against other SSDs had been added so that clearly did improve the review quite a lot.

Anyway thanks again hexus. I have been looking at these drives on ebuyer for quite sometime ... even more tempted now.