Testing:

The testing portion of the review will have the 128GB Kingston solid state drive matched up against three other SSDs and one traditional 2.5" SATA hard drive.

» 30GB Kingston SSDnow V Series [review link]
» 32GB Super Talent UltraDrive FTM32GX25H SSD [at eWiz.com]
» 60GB OCZ Technology Agility [review link]
» 320GB Western Digital Scorpio 2.5" SATA-II hard drive [review link]

The tests to be executed on the drives include benchmarks from four pre-packaged applications, as listed below.

» CrystalDiskMark 2.2 (5, 100MB)
» PassMark Performance Test Advanced Disk Test (64-Bit)
» AS SSD Benchmark 1.4.3704.27281
» PCMark Vantage x64

CrystalDiskMark 2.2 (5, 100MB):

CrystalDiskMark's simple read and write tests provide the first set of results for us to consider in this review. Testing was conducted with sequential reads and writes, random reads and writes using 512K blocks, and random reads and writes using 4K blocks. Each test provides results with units in terms of MB/s, and higher is again better.





The two graphs on this page take a look at the sequential read and write performance of the five drives tested. What we see is an extremely high read speed for the Kingston drive, which not only exceeds the performance of the other drives, but exceeds its own specifications by about 20%. Repeat testing confirmed the results. The write testing results weren't as impressive for this Kingston drive since they didn't blow past their published value of 160MB/s, but they are still very respectable.