Kingston Technology SSDNow V+ 128GB

Kingston’s SSDNow V+ is an internal solid state drive (SSD) that uses the same 2.5-inch form factor as a standard notebook hard drive. It comes in 64GB, 128GB and 256GB capacities. We tested the $319, 128GB model and found that even though it performed well, over time it suffered a minor slowdown in read speeds.

We installed the SSDNow V+ into an easily upgradeable, late 2008 Unibody MacBook with a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo processor and 2GB of RAM, and ran a series of tests on the MacBook’s internal 5400-rpm, 2.5-inch Toshiba hard drive to serve as a baseline before running the tests on the SSD drive. We also ran the same tests on a 7200-rpm, 320GB Western Digital Scorpio Black hard drive, to serve as another point of reference—a faster drive than the standard internal, but at $100, much less expensive than the Kingston drive.

We found that the SSDNow V+ drive was 68 percent faster than the stock Toshiba drive when duplicating a 1GB file, and 48 percent faster than the 7200-rpm Scorpio Black. Uncompressing a 2GB Zip file on the SSDNow V+ was 50 percent faster than on the Toshiba and 24 percent faster than on the Scorpio Black. It took the Kingston SSD 55 percent less time to launch Photoshop than on the Toshiba, and was 33 percent faster than the 7200-rpm Scropio Black.

After hearing reports of SSD performance degradation over time, we decided to run another set of tests using Mac Performance Guide’s DiskTester application. The application includes a Fill Disk test that, as its name implies, fills the target drive with small files until it reaches capacity. The application tracks the Read and Write speeds of the drive throughout the process and includes an average speed result at the end of the task—a speedy 187 MBps reading and 159MBps writing in the case of the SSDNow V+. For comparison’s sake, the 7200-rpm Scorpio Black averaged 51MBps read speeds and 62MBps write speeds. One of the fastest SSD we’ve tested, OWC’s Mercury Extreme Pro RE 200GB SSD () came in at over 250MBps read and 173MBps write.

We then followed a script used by Mac Performance Guide to “season” the drives, by erasing, filling, erasing, cloning a system to it, erasing, filling and erasing the drive once more before installing our test system back on the drive and running the Fill Disk test again.While the write speeds were unchanged, the read speeds slowed by about 5 percent, from 187MBps to 159MBps.

SSDs can suffer from trash management problems—knowing what blocks can be allocated even after data has been deleted from the drive. Windows 7 offers something called TRIM, but that is not available on the Mac. To get around this problem, some SSDs use over-provisioning, which sets aside some of the SSD’s capacity to replace bad blocks and for general maintenance and housekeeping tasks. The downside is that the drive has less available capacity, a real problem for SSDs, as they already lag behind hard drives in terms of capacity and price per gigabyte. The SSDNow V+ does not implement over-provisioning, so you get the full 128GB of storage, but performance may suffer in the long term.

Macworld’s buying advice

The SSDNow V+ is a middle-of-the-road SSD that, when compared to standard spinning hard drives, offers limited capacity, a high price per gigabyte and fast performance. Compared to other SSDs, the SSDNow V+ offers decent performance, comparable price and only a modest decrease in read speeds over time.

[James Galbraith is Macworld’s lab director.]