Final thoughts and rating
The performance numbers corroborate what we've learned thus far from looking at premium SSDs. Those equipped with a Samsung controller tend to be faster than Indilinx-powered drives when evaluated with respect to sequential speed, but they tend to lose out when writing a bunch of small-sized file to the drive.Kingston's SSDNow V+ 64GB can be thought of as a factory-badged Samsung PB22-J, and its performance falls in line with what we expect to see from such drives, which is reasonably strong when run in a factory-fresh state but worsens, slightly, over time as the foibles of SSDs kick in. Kingston/Samsung has a feature that ameliorates the issue by deleting written-to blocks, but it's a nascent technology which will undoubtedly improve over time.
Should you buy the Kingston, then? Priced at around £140 and backed by a three-year warranty, there's very little to differentiate it from the rest of the Samsung gang. Look across the SSD landscape for the budget end of the market and no drive is wholly issue-free. We'd recommend readers wait a while and let the technology develop to the extent that brand-new performance is guaranteed. The extra time should also help push prices down to below £100 for a quality 64GB drive, too.
Bottom line: Kingston's SSDNow V+ 64GB, currently etailing at £140, is a decent example of a premium SSD in Q4 2009. Blazingly fast for sequential read and writes, small-file write performance isn't so hot.
HEXUS Rating
We consider any product score above '50%' as a safe buy. The higher the score, the higher the recommendation from HEXUS to buy. Simple, straightforward buying advice.
The rating is given in relation to the category the component competes in, therefore the SSD is evaluated with respect to our 'mid-range components' criteria, where value plays a larger part in the overall score.
Kingston SSDNow V+ 64GB
HEXUS Where2Buy
The Kingston SSDNow V+ 64GB SSD can be purchased from CCL at a cost of £140.08.
HEXUS Right2Reply
At HEXUS, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any company representatives for the products reviewed choose to respond, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.
