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Kingston Solid State Drives A Solid Value
Memory maker Kingston Digital’s SSDNow V+ solid state drives, released in January, deliver faster read-and-write performance than previous-generation SSDs, and are available in 64-, 128-, 256- and 512-GB editions. Listing for $268, $512, $992 and $1,969, the CRN Test Center recommends the 2.5-inch drives for resellers seeking high-speed storage for new systems or as rugged replacement hard drives for laptops, top-tier arrays and other high-end systems. The drives are covered by a three-year warranty.
Testers received a 256-GB drive as part of an upgrade kit, which includes a USB drive enclosure, SATA data and power cables, drive brackets and Windows-only cloning software; the upgrade kit adds $15 to the list price. Testers connected the unit via USB to an Apple MacBook running Mac OS X Leopard, and used SuperDuper to copy system data to the new drive. Once the drive was made bootable, it was installed in place of Apple’s Hitachi-branded 160-GB factory drive.
Xbench performance test results were fairly impressive. The SSDNow turned in a score of 230, compared with the Hitachi’s overall score of 42. The Kingston drive’s fastest transfer rate was in sequential reads of large (256K) blocks at 189 MB/s to the Hitachi’s 56 MB/s. With random writes of 4K blocks, the SSD outstripped Hitachi 26 MB/s to 1 MB/s, and when large blocks were involved, solid state outperformed magnetic by nearly 20 times, delivering 8.9 MB/s to Hitachi’s .46 MB/s. Kingston’s SSDNow V+ drives also support the TRIM command, a spec that prevents SSD write degradation over time.
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