Kingston SSDNow V+ Series 128GB

Kingston's website says its SSDNow V+ Series drives "dramatically increase the performance of existing systems" and after testing this SSD, we have to agree.

Like the other drives here the V+ Series uses NAND flash memory and offers a capacity of 128GB. Kingston offers desktop and notebook SSD kits and because our test sample features a 2.5-inch form factor, it ships with mounting rails as standard. As a result you can mount this SSD without investing in additional hardware and, as a bonus, the SSD also ships with drive cloning software. These inclusions make it very simple to replace your existing drive.

Performance-wise the SSDNow V+ proved very potent. Despite Kingston claiming slower read and write speeds compared to some of the other SSDs in this grouptest, the V+ SSD was actually a rocket. It completed our real world Company of Heroes and F.E.A.R level load tests in a sizzling 17- and seven-seconds respectively. These were the fastest load times we recorded in the grouptest. Our HDTach3 benchmark also showed that the drive demanded just 2% of our test bed CPU's time, making the V+ the least CPU dependent drive here.

The performance does come at a price however because the SSDNow V+ carries a price tag of US $371, which works out to $2.89 per gigabyte. This makes the Kingston the second most expensive drive here.