The SSD market is still relatively new, device prices are slowly descending into the plebs, but the entire process still seems excruciatingly slow, which means that it’ll take additional time for SSDs to truly become an ordinary feat in today’s computers. Speeds are increasing with each successive generation, but even if there are devices on the market already with mindboggling speeds and throughput, the same adjective applies to their price. This is best supported by OCZ’s PCI-Express SSD which we had the chance to see at this year’s CeBIT - its declared reading/writing speeds are just under 2 GB/s (not Gb/s, but GB/s, together with 200.000 IOPS). Kingston has been synonymous with the sweet spot on the market as far as the price/performance ratio is concerned, whether it’s their memory, flash disks or SSDs in question. This time, the V series has been refreshed with V 100 models, which are a generational step ahead, but also propose an entirely new approach.
Truth be told, Kingston has made things rather complicated in the naming department of their SSDs: they are simultaneously keeping the market supplied with the M and E series (rebranded Intel drives), while the SSDNow V and V+ series are now being replenished with V 100 and V+ 100 models. We’ve received SSDs with a capacity of 128 GB for testing, and the difference between V and V+ models is noticeable, as ever.
Since lifetime and price are still SSDs’ main detractors, Kingston has decided to invest a bit of thought and work in this department; well, at least as far as lifetime is concerned. This is particularly the case with the more expensive, SSDNow V+ 100 model. Toshiba’s T6UG1XBG controller has remained unchanged from the previous V+ series, but comes with an improved firmware. As a reminder, this chip has native TRIM support, and with the new firmware, Kingston has improved the “garbage collector”, now visibly more aggressive, which in turn provides a much longer lifetime compared to previous SSD generations and functions independently of the operating system. As T6UG1XBG has an entire 128 MB of cache, it’s only expected for additional speed to be tangible in the operating system and dependent applications. The casing of V+ 100 hasn’t been visually amended, but the material that it’s made of is very firm and resistant.
The situation with V 100 is a bit different. The casing is almost identical to the naked eye, so if you miss the plus on the marking itself, the only difference is in the yellow tape on the sticker, which is red on V+ 100. Once you lift it, you can feel that there’s a difference in weight, but also the materials used, which are lighter and softer than those used for V+ 100. Opening the casings reveals that the difference in weight doesn’t come merely from the casing itself, but also from the massive thermal pad found in V+ 100, which is entirely absent from V 100, bar the controller section.
The controller inside V 100 is JMicron’s JMF618, which has half the cache of the aforementioned Toshiba’s, but still provides excellent performance in sequential data read/write.
The odd piece of information is that the Kingston-declared read/write speeds are much lower on the box of V+ 100 compared to those on V 100, despite the opposite relation in price. Now the truly bizarre part is that these were soon confirmed by synthetic benchmarks. However, in everyday work simulation, the situation is much better in favour of V+ 100. The answer to the riddle is as follows - Toshiba’s controller has been tweaked in such a way that it provides more IOPS (Input/Output operations per second) at the expense of results in sequential read/write. Furthermore, the garbage collector has been drastically modified, according to Kingston, so the new lifespan of V+ 100 models is drastically longer, which is promoted as one of their biggest advantages.
