Kingston SSDnow V100 64GB review

We’ve looked at several Kingston SSDs in the past, each of which impressed us with their combination of great performance and reasonable price. Because they use memory controllers designed by Toshiba instead of enthusiast-oriented Sandforce chips, each disk costs considerably less than many high-end SSDs with similar capacities.

Early V100 models had a firmware bug that could cause system crashes, so Kingston issued an update to correct it. All new disks should include the updated firmware as standard, but you can check by looking at the label on the SSD itself; if it says D110225a, there’s no reason to update again. We tested our unit using the new firmware.

We were impressed with how well the disk performed in our file transfer benchmarks, managing 123.7MB/s write and 191.5MB/s read speeds when handling large files. The small files test was equally impressive at 80.4MB/s write and 78.3MB/s read speeds, a good showing for any SSD. Crysis loaded in 27 seconds, the same time it took a Sandforce-equipped disk.

The 64GB SSD we looked at is a no-frills version that lacks the 2 1/2in caddy included with the ‘Notebook Bundle’. This saves you around £8, but if you’re planning on replacing a working laptop hard disk, it’s worth the extra to continue using your old hard disk in a portable USB caddy. Either way, the V100 is fantastic value at just £1.21 per GB and makes an excellent upgrade to a mechanical hard disk.