Mainstream SSDs: Kingston and A-Data

SOLID STATE DRIVES aren't an expensive accessory for the chosen few anymore. The prices have come tumbling down as the capacities have shot up into hundreds of gigabytes.

Sixty-four gigabyte is now a widely accepted starting point, with the OS and key applications (mostly file-read once installed, with fewer write operations) are on the SSD for a quick boot, while the data and swap files should be on a secondary HDD.

Here we have two such 64GB SATA 2.5in drives that fall into this newly affordable category: the A-Data XPG, and Kingston ssdNOW V.

The capacity and format aren't the only similarities between the two: even the casing design is quite similar except for the colour. A-Data drive has an extra USB port to use additionally as an (unusually large) external USB stick. Kingston's offerng has a little more elegant cover of matt grey. The Kingston drive also comes with a more complete software suite, including a hard disk cloning applet.

I ran both drives on the same Core i7 975 Asus Rampage II Extreme setup used for the OC Station test yesterday. Under 64-bit Vista, the Sandra 2009 SP3 tests were used to run both raw read speed as well as I/O ops/minute throughput.

Even though the Kingston V drive was only detected as SATA150 speed, it was sufficient for its read speed peak throughput. Rght now, there's still little impact moving from SATA150 to 300 except in read bursts.

Here are the benchmarks - as you can see, it's pretty much an even battle, with the A-Data drive having substantially higher peak read bandwidth, and the Kingston one having a little more result consistency:

Here you can see the IO operations per minute:

Also, take a look at more detailed I/O ops breakdown for various file sizes between the reads and writes for A-Data:

And for Kingston:

Something interesting to learn from this exercise is that except for the very top of the crop, most mainstream SSDs are basically at or slightly above the SATA150 performance limit. So going for the upcoming 6Gbit/s SATA600 might not be as useful as originally thought - yet.

Furthermore, the interface speed doesn't affect the I/O operations per minute. Here, Kingston is right behind the Intel SSD and well ahead of A-Data - as in eight times faster.

Even more interesting - notice that OCZ and A-Data drives have the similarly low IOPs scores. As A-data is an OEM to many other vendors, the similarities might end there. The problem seems to be the write performance.

In summary, both of these inexpensive drives are a fairly good deal as long as they are not the only drive in a system. There are some numbers inconsistencies, but SSDs are still at an early stage of development, so varied controllers, caches and algorithms can affect the results.

Until 200GB and larger SSDs become cheaper, the combination of a small SSD for OS and apps and secondary HDD for all the rest like downloaded videos, 3D models, game files or whatever you're into, makes the best sense in a decent mainstream PC. µ