V300 Benchmark Brief
1
Overview of Consumer SSD Oering
HyperX: Designed for enthusiasts and gamers, HyperX® 3K SSD is Kingston’s fastest SSD product.
KC300: Targeted to the business user with additional security and power savings features, KC300 is a
high- performing, business-oriented SSD with security and power saving features.
V300: Ideal for consumers, this entry-level SSD delivers a good mix of price and performance. It’s designed
for HDD replacement, with a balance between performance and entry-level pricing.
Product Builds and Speed Dierences – V300
In order to achieve a balance of price and performance, we must maintain the exibility to source NAND
Flash components from various Tier 1 NAND manufacturers. At times, this will mean that there is a
dierence in benchmarked performance, where certain builds outperform our advertised specication
(450MB/s Read / Write) while other drives will meet the advertised specication. Regardless of revision, all
V300 SSDs still demonstrate 10x performance when compared to HDDs.
Product Testing Using ATTO
Our SSD performance specication is based on the ATTO benchmark, which demonstrates the sequential
read and write capabilities of our drives using the LSI SandForce® controller; what is absent from these
numbers and not often captured in benchmarks is the eectiveness of the underlying LSI SandForce
DuraWrite™ technology. The DuraWrite architecture was designed to extend the life of the NAND used within
Kingston® SSDs. It does this by using unique algorithms that reduce the amount of data written to the SSDs
Flash memory cells, thus extending NAND and SSD life. A benecial byproduct of this reduction is a resulting
increase in performance when compressible data is used. (Learn more about DuraWrite in this video.)
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Figure 1
V300 Benchmark Brief
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Figure 1 shows the results from ATTO using the V300 120GB SSD with both synchronous and asynchronous
NAND Flash. Asynchronous NAND typically operates at a slower MT/s rate than synchronous NAND, but
still enables a very high performing SSD. The HDD used in these tests is a 7200RPM 500GB SATA 6Gb/s.
All drives in the following tests were used as the primary drive in the system running Windows 7 64 bit,
installed on an ASUS 87 chipset desktop motherboard. Both the V300 SSDs were preconditioned with
random writes before testing began. As you can see, both versions of the V300 are exceeding our baseline
450MB/s spec.
Product Testing Using Crystal Disk Mark
A few benchmarks, like Crystal Disk Mark, use fully random incompressible data by default, which as stated
before, will produce a lower read score depending on the build of the V300 we are testing. Benchmarks
like this typically send a pre-dened amount of data to the SSD and measure how long it takes to read
from and write to it. This is ne, but it only gives a snapshot of SSD performance. Sequential read and
write speeds are a key component of SSD performance but so are random 4k performance, boot times,
application/game launching ability, application performance, waking from standby, time to complete
system shut down, initiating system hibernation and opening apps while the SSD is engaged with other
activities. We believe the sum of these features lead to a great user experience not captured in benchmarks
and are the reasons why customers purchase SSDs.
Typical users don’t spend the bulk of their time on the computer copying incompressible data like MP3,
MPEG and Zip les to and from their SSD. The data we deal with day in and day out is a mix of random,
sequential, compressible, incompressible and everything in between. Figure 2 shows Crystal Disk Mark
Scores for the test drives; and notice the eect of fully random incompressible data. The sequential scores
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25.35
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85.9
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185.2
94.07
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94.78
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CrystalDiskMarkMB/sHigherisbeIer
459
141
408
139
25.35
135.9
85.9
139.4
185.2
94.07
173
94.78
19.34
92.24
71.23
91.34
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124.8
44.12
53.17
0.603
1.202
1.35
1.196
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CrystalDiskMarkMB/sHigherisbeIer
459
141
408
139
25.35
135.9
85.9
139.4
185.2
94.07
173
94.78
19.34
92.24
71.23
91.34
125.8
124.8
44.12
53.17
0.603
1.202
1.35
1.196
0
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SeqRead SeqWrite 512KRead 512KWrite 4KRead 4kWrite 4KQD32Read4KQD32Write
V300120S
V300120A
7200RPMHDD
CrystalDiskMarkMB/sHigherisbeIer
459
141
408
139
25.35
135.9
85.9
139.4
185.2
94.07
173
94.78
19.34
92.24
71.23
91.34
125.8
124.8
44.12
53.17
0.603
1.202
1.35
1.196
0
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SeqRead SeqWrite 512KRead 512KWrite 4KRead 4kWrite 4KQD32Read4KQD32Write
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7200RPMHDD
CrystalDiskMarkMB/sHigherisbeIer
459
141
408
139
25.35
135.9
85.9
139.4
185.2
94.07
173
94.78
19.34
92.24
71.23
91.34
125.8
124.8
44.12
53.17
0.603
1.202
1.35
1.196
0
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SeqRead SeqWrite 512KRead 512KWrite 4KRead 4kWrite 4KQD32Read4KQD32Write
V300120S
V300120A
7200RPMHDD
CrystalDiskMarkMB/sHigherisbeIer
Figure 2
V300 Benchmark Brief
3
of both versions of the V300 drop from the speeds seen in ATTO but Pay close attention to the 4K Random
scores; 4K random read/write measures how fast a drive is able to access small les that are randomly
scattered across it. A drive with higher 4K numbers will able to multi-task better, making for a more
responsive operating system that can run more background programs (e.g. virus shield, rewall, torrents,
instant messengers etc.) without any slowdowns or stuttering. For an operating system boot drive, 4K
random read speeds are the most important, followed by 4K random write speed. Random incompressible
data is worse case for any SSD yet both versions of the V300 are at least 7000 percent faster in 4k random
writes and at least 3000 percent faster in 4k random reads.
Product Testing Using Anvil
Another popular synthetic benchmark is Anvil. We used a mixed workload with 46 percent compressible
data, to represent a typical user’s mixed workload, so the SandForce DuraWrite feature is working here.
Notice the 4K Que Depth (QD) of 4. Que depth is the amount of outstanding read and or writes requests
waiting to access the system drive. A que depth of 0-5 covers the vast majority of a typical desktop/
notebook usage models. Once again, the V300 using asynchronous NAND tops the HDD by over 8,000
percent and 20,000 percent in random QD4 reads and writes. When data is at all compressible, write
performance will go up.
Figure 3
V300 Benchmark Brief
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Anvil Storage Utilities will also provide a total drive score derived from totaling both sequential
and random read/write scores. In Figure 4, you can see both V300s surpass the HDD by more than
1,000 percent.
PRODUCT TESTING USING PCMARK VANTAGE AND PCMARK 8
To stress and measure the performance of Kingston drives in a dierent way, we use trace-based
benchmarks that simulate a workload by playing back the I/O trace captured while the test was originally
run using various applications. One of these trace-based tests is the PCMark Vantage storage benchmark.
The storage benchmark focuses on applications that include music, video, pictures, games and security.
The test suite measures how long it takes the drive to complete each task and provides an overall storage
bandwidth in Bytes per second. It is important because it creates a more realistic snapshot of how the SSD
would perform in real world scenarios common to the everyday user.
The comparison below demonstrates how the V300 dominates the HDD in everyday tasks. The
performance delta is over 1,100 percent.
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Figure 5
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Figure 4
V300 Benchmark Brief
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Recently, we implemented the PCMark 8 testing suite. The new workload uses traces from World of
Warcraft, Battleeld, Adobe Photoshop, In Design, After Eects, Illustrator and Microsoft Oce applications.
This test suite also measures how long it takes the drive to complete tasks and provides storage bandwidth
per task in Megabytes per second. As expected, the V300 120GB using Asynchronous NAND still outscores
the HDD by more than 1,400 percent.
Product Testing Using Real World Scenarios
The nal testing segment involves actual user input using downloadable applications that allow you
to edit, import, copy, play and create content. It simulates working with music, video, pictures and
incorporates web browsing, game playing and le copying. In each test, the V300s, both Synchronous
and Asynchronous, are signicantly faster than the HDD. Similarly, they are very close to each other in
performance in all tests with the exception of the le copy. The data used in the le copy test is composed
of large, incompressible les and will demonstrate the worst-case scenario for the SSD, yet the SSD is still
60-percent faster than the HDD.
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Figure 6
V300 Benchmark Brief
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A Word on Durawrite, Flash Endurance, and Smart Data
There is more to SSD performance than synthetic benchmarks can demonstrate. All Flash-based hardware
(USB drives, tablets, music players, etc.) has a nite life. Think of your storage device as having a gas gauge
tied to writes. Every write performed to the storage device will use up some endurance and the device
will eventually wear out. SSD endurance is typically measured in TBW (total bytes written) and goes
from hundreds of terabytes to petabytes, depending on drive capacity. DuraWrite technology eectively
reduces these writes and extends the life of your SSD.
To demonstrate the eectiveness of DuraWrite, review the screen capture of the SMART data below. The
data is from a PC used for gaming, video production, photo editing and typical Internet activity. In most
cases, typical user data is at least partly compressible. Attribute 241 shows that the PC has sent 443 GBs
of data to the SSD. This means that we would expect the SSD to have written at least 443GB to the NAND
if not more. Attribute 233 displays the actual amount of writes to the SSD and demonstrates the SSD
only wrote 285GB to the SSD, proving that for this specic workload, there is a fair amount of data that is
Figure 7
V300 Benchmark Brief
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compressible. Anyone using a Kingston V300, KC300 or HyperX SSD can look at the same data with the
Kingston SSD toolbox or any SMART reader.
Final Thoughts
All Kingston SSDs go through a rigorous qualication process. The process begins with qualifying the
NAND Flash components used, to ensure a high-quality product, and continues through each step of the
manufacturing process before the drive leaves the warehouse.
We realize not all V300s will score the same across all benchmarks but we maintain all V300 SSDs meet the
performance targets mentioned above and this is proven with test data. Benchmarks are a great way to
quickly get an idea of performance but at the end of the day, your personal workload is better than any
synthetic benchmark available.
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