Testing
After doing a few hard drive reviews we have come up with 4 hard drive benchmarking programs we like to use here at ThinkComputers, they are HDTune, ATTO Disk Benchmark, CrystalDiskMark and Sandra’s Physical Disks benchmark. For comparison we will be testing the SSDNow V+ drive against the Crucial M225 256GB drive, OCZ Agility 60GB drive and Kingston SSDNow V-Series 128GB drive. The Crucial and OCZ drives are based on the Indilinx Barefoot controller and the Kingston drive has the older JMicron controller with custom firmware. Keep in mind the advertised speeds for this drive is 230MB/s read and 180MB/s write.

HDTune is our first test and it tests the average read and access time of the drive.

As you can see the drive performs a little under the advertised speed getting an average read speed of 198.6MB/s. Next using HDTune Pro we did the 64MB file test.

In this test the drive topped out at around the advertised 230MB/s write and 180MB/s read. Since the release of HDTune 3.5 there has been a new Random Access test added to the software. This test measures the performance of random read and write operations. Tests are taken in 512b, 4KB, 64KB, 1MB, and random file sizes. The performance of the drive is reported in operations a second (IOPS), average access time and average speed.

The read test performed excellent. You can see the 4KB test scored a 7334 IOPS.

The write test also did very well. For comparison I looked up reviews of the original V+ drive done with the random access test in HDTune. Most of the drives scored very low in the 1MB and Random tests with scores averaging 20-30MB/s. As you can see above the new second-generation drive scored very high in those areas. It looks like Kingston has done a lot of work with the controller on this drive.