So Kingston sent us an SSD in the mail. We’ve never reviewed SSDs, but considering how they offer a significant bump in the OS and gaming experience, we accepted the product with smiling faces, and here we have for you, our first ever SSD review!
SSD stands for Solid State Drive. They work on a completely different mechanism than your typical magnetic spindle based SATA drives. The physicality of these drives makes them noisy and slow, not to mention their high usage of energy. SSD’s don’t work with moving parts, making them noise free and acutely faster than traditional drives. SSDs were expensive when they were introduced some 4-5 years back, but now aggressive pricing and technology advancement have led them to be embraced into mainstream usage.
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Unboxing and External Examination
The Kingston SSDNow UV100 comes in a straight-forward shrink wrapped packaging. All you get is the SSD itself, a mounting bracket and an installation manual. There are no extras and goodies, this is a fairly utilitarian package.
The SSD itself is light weight, and man is the size small or what! If you’ve been working with HDD’s, the form factor of an SSD will be a revelation for you. Stacking 5 SSD’s together will make up the size of an HDD, and their weight is only fractional to that of an HDD. This one is only 7mm thick and about 2.5 inches long. It is compatible with both SATA 2 and SATA 3 controllers.
The casing of the Kingston SSDNow UV100 is made of hard plastic. There are no loose corners and protrusions. The build quality, like the packaging, is very utilitarian. While it isn’t high grade, it isn’t low either. This is after all, a mainstream SSD.
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Specifications of the Kingston SSDNow UV100 60 GB
Looking up on Kingston’s Official website, we see that the UV100 is more of an entry-level/business SSD solution offered by the company, aimed at price sensitive consumers. There are faster SSDs available, and we will get on them for our future articles. Here are the specifications of this one:
Form factor: 2.5″
Interface: SATA Rev. 3.0 (6Gb/s) – with backwards compatibility to SATA Rev. 2.0 (3Gb/s)
Capacity: 60GB
Sequential Read/Write: up to: 425/ 425MB/s
Maximum 4k Read/Write: up to 65,000/26,000 IOPS
Random 4k Read/Write: up to: 45,000/7,500 IOPS
PCMARK® Vantage HDD Suite Score: 55,000
Total Bytes Written (TBW): 60GB – 32TB
Power consumption: 0.08 W Idle / 0.108 W Avg / 1.025 W (MAX) Read / 2.8 W (MAX) Write
Storage temperatures: -40° to 85°C
Operating temperatures: 0° to 70°C
Dimensions: 100.3mm x 69.9mm x 7mm
Weight: 77.5g
Vibration operating: 2.17G Peak (7–800Hz)
Vibration non-operating: 20G Peak (10–2000Hz)
MTBF: 1 million hours
Warranty/support: 2-year warranty with free technical support
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Performance
Installing the Kingston SSDNow UV100 was pretty straightforward. The included mounting bracket was of no use, thanks to our Corsair Obsidian 750D case, which has an impeccably impressive and convenient SSD mounting system.
Our test system looks like this:
Motherboard: Asrock Z77 PRO
CPU: Intel Core i7-3570K @ 4.5Ghz
CPU Cooler: CoolerMaster Hyper Evo 212+
Memory: 8 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 SD RAM at 1600Mhz
Graphics Cards: Nvidia GeForce 780Ti
Sound Card: ASUS Xonar DX
SSD: Kingston SSDNow UV100 60GB
HDD: WD Green 1TB, WD Blue 2TB
Power Supply: Seasonic 850W
OS: Windows 8.1
Windows Startup Time
SSD: 10 seconds
HDD: ~1 minutes
Coming from a typical HDD, the startup times of SSD are substantially faster. On an HDD, it takes around 45 seconds to one minute for Windows to completely. On the SSD, our system took about 10 seconds to boot up and be ready for use.
Game Installation Times
Tomb Raider (on SSD): 2 minutes
Tomb Raider (on HDD): 7 minutes
Since this SSD has just 60GB of storage space, there is not much we can do with games. However, we did install Dota 2 and Tomb Raider on the SSD. We will get to game loading times and benchmarks later. I wasn’t even going to talk about game installation times, but the speed impact was so significant that I had to mention it.
If you install a 10+ GB game like Tomb Raider from a DVD/digital to an HDD, it takes roughly seven minutes to install. Installing the same game on an SSD took us below two minutes, owing to the exponentially faster write times. Same was the case of Dota 2.
Game Load Times
Dota 2 (5v5 match)
SSD: 13 seconds
HDD: 19 seconds
Tomb Raider
SSD: 7 seconds
HDD: 14 seconds
Copy times
Here we test the time it takes to copy a 1.75 GB file in the following situations:
-From HDD to SSD: 17.33 seconds
-From HDD to HDD: 13.53 seconds
These results show a disparity in copy times. The SSD should have copied the file faster, but so is not the case. We suspect this to be probably due to the limiting write speeds on the HDD, which bottleneck the SSD copy performance.
Synthetic Benchmark Scores
Synthetics don’t really reflect on real world performance, but we understand that they matter to a lot of buyers.
AS SSD Benchmark: Read/Write – 474/94 MBps
Crystal Disk Mark: Sequential Read/Write – 479/100 MBps
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Conclusion
The Kingston SSDNow Uv100 60GB is placed as an entry level SSD, mostly aimed at business users who don’t work with too much space hogging multimedia files. Alternatively, the Uv100 60Gb is also targeted at users looking to add an additional SSD for the OS installation drive. Installing your operating system on the SSD increases the speed of day-to-day activities substantially. You can always store your multimedia files on an HDD.
Infact, that is the kind of setup we recommend the most: OS on SSD and storage on HDD. Ideally, you can always get a 1TB SSD and just dump everything in it along with the OS, but prices of SSDs are high, so a low capacity SSD + high capacity HDD combination makes more sense.
Coming to the Kingston SSDNow UV100 60GB, there is a considerable value proposition here. Retailing at around INR 3,000 you couldn’t really go wrong here. Bundle that with a 2 year warranty and there is nothing really negative we can say about this SSD. It performs like a value-SSD, but an SSD nevertheless.
