Doing business can be rough, and paying for it can be rougher. So it’s easy to understand the appeal of something like Kingston’s SSDNow V+200 upgrade system, which gives you everything you need to copy data from the spinning hard drive in your desktop or laptop to a solid-state drive (SSD) that will offer vastly improved performance and reliability. And the upgrade part of the 120GB version of the SSDNow V+200 (priced at about $190, or $175 if you don’t feel the need for the full kit) is the part we like most; it’s the drive itself, which is far from an optimal performer, that we’re less sure of.

From a hardware standpoint, the SSDNow V+200 is not poorly equipped. At its heart is a SandForce SF-2281 controller and 16 chips of Intel 25nm asynchronous NAND flash memory. The 8GB difference between this total and the stated capacity accounts for firmware, overprovisioning, and other features the drive needs to work; after formatting the drive, you have about 112GB of usable space.

But even if you don’t know anything about disk drives, hard or solid-state, the SSDNow system is designed to be easy to use. Along with the 2.5-inch drive itself, you get a DVD containing drive cloning software, a mounting bracket for use in a desktop computer, an internal SATA transfer cable, an adapter for converting a four-pin Molex cable into a SATA power cable, and, perhaps best of all, an external enclosure (complete with USB 2.0 data cable) that will let you take the drive with you wherever you go. The printed instructions are clear and easy to follow.

These accessories do, however, point a problem: speed. The drive supports 6Gbps SATA III, but if you install the drive in the enclosure and use that on the road, you have to contend with older and slower USB 2.0 rather than the zippier USB 3.0 that’s been gaining ground over the last year or so. With no other higher-speed options (like eSATA or Thunderbolt) on the enclosure, your options and your transfer rates are always going to be limited.

We only tested the SSDNow V+200 drive hooked into a desktop, but that’s certainly what we found. To be clear, the drive isn’t an objectively poor performer; it’s certainly going to be faster than any hard drive, which is the entire point of the upgrade kit in the first place. But because this kit is intended as a basic value proposition rather than the ultimate in storage tune-up options, you don’t generally get the kinds of speeds you will with the best SSDs on the market.

On the AS SSD Benchmark, for example, sequential reads and writes with the SSDNow V+200 came in at 206.9MBps and 138.8MBps respectively—compared with 511.1MBps and 318.4MBps respectively for our current Editors’ Choice, the 128GB Samsung SSD 830 Series. The Samsung drive also came in considerably ahead in the same application’s Copy Benchmark (257.4MBps versus 95.8MBs in the ISO Speed test and 186.6MBps versus 82.8MBps on the Program Speed test), throughout the CrystalDiskMark sequential tests (526.9MBps for reads and 322.2MBps for writes versus 212.8MBps and 145.9MBps respectively on the Samsung), and across the board on Futuremark PCMark 7 (though the two drives tied on the Adding Music task, at 1.41MBps).

The good news is that the SSDNow V+200 acquits itself very well in terms of write speeds. On the AS SSD Benchmark, it won the day with straight 4KB writes (75.9MBps versus 73.3MBps for the Samsung) and 64-thread writes (131.9MBps versus 89.6MBps for the Samsung). And on the ATTO Disk Benchmark, it was the write champ for all but the 1KB and 2KB tasks, and better at both reads and writes for 2MB, 4MB, and 8MB workloads. We saw similar results in CrystalDiskMark as well, with the Kingston’s results for 4KB reads and writes (29.2MBps and 89.3MBps) and 4KB reads with a queue depth of 32 (142.3MBps) better than what the Samsung could do (24MBps, 85.9MBps, and 119.7MBps respectively, though the Samsung’s 259.9MBps read rate in the Crystal DiskMark 4KB test with higher queue depth smoked the Kingston’s of 90.6MBps).

This means there’s no reason that the 120GB Kingston SSDNow V+200 can’t be a fine purchase for your business—you just need to make sure you know why you want it. If you don’t need warp-scale speeds all the time, but when you do need them they’re more important for writing information than reading it, then it will serve you well. Because of its overall better balance, we’re sticking with the Samsung SSD 830 Series as our Editors’ Choice. But the SSDNow V+200 kit is a solidly composed upgrade solution that even cash-strapped professionals will likely be able to afford.

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