For testing the Kingston V+ 200 series 120GB SSD the following testbed was used:

For comparisons I have used the Kingston HyperX 120GB and OCZ Vertex 3 120GB solid state drives. All three drives cost roughly the same, with similar performance rated by the respective manufacturers.

PCMark 7

The PCMark 7 Storage benchmarks are some of the most stressing tests designed for modern hard drives and solid state drives. There are a number of tests performed, focusing on different aspects of the drive and eventually churn out a score based on the overall performance of the drive. Below I have shown the total PCMark 7 storage score for multiple hard drives and SSDs.

Speeds

I have used ATTO Disk Benchmark to get the sequential read and write speeds, while the burst speed was measured using HD Tach.

Windows 7 Boot Time

For the Windows 7 boot time, I installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit on these hard drives, with just the basic drivers installed for the motherboard and graphics card. No antivirus or any other applications were installed since any programs installed by users are arbitrary and will change startup time. The time measured in seconds below is after POST (when the ‘Starting Windows’ logo appears) till the time I see the desktop and mouse.

Conclusion

The Kingston V+ 200 Series SSD won’t be winning any speed awards, as is clear from the benchmarks above, which is mainly due to the 256-bit hardware level encryption going on inside. You get a small performance hit on the speeds, but the CPU is left to do its own thing without being encumbered by encryption software. Reliability from the SandForce based RAISE system should also ensure that data doesn’t get corrupted if a block fails.

In the end, these are features that are more appreciated by businesses (for its employees) more than PC enthusiasts. The pricing for the V+ 200 Series is on par with performance variants from other manufacturers like OCZ, Corsair and Kingston themselves (with the HyperX SSD). So for companies and professionals who value data integrity (with three years 24/7 support) plus hardware level encryption, the Kingston V+200 Series SSDs are an excellent choice as the pricing is just about right. PC enthusiasts who want the absolute edge in terms of performance are better off with Kingston’s HyperX series.