Kingston SSDnow M2 SATA 120GB Solid State Drive Review

Anvil’s Storage Utilities

Anvil’s Storage Utilities is a new benchmarking utility that we have started using here at eTeknix, it’s completely free to download and has the ability to test mainly hard drives and solid state drives, but also any other form of storage medium that you can throw at it.

As well as testing the drive in a variety of benchmarking tests, it also has a drive endurance test that consistently reads and writes data to the selected medium to give days, months and potentially even years of use in a shorter period of time to see how the drive copes in the longer term.

Compressible Data

The Kingston M.2 SATA 120GB drive looks to have some fluctuations in the chart above, but when we take a closer look at the numbers we see that it’s minimal and just about 1% where it occurs.

Incompressible Data

A drive couldn’t show figures that are more stable than what we see in the incompressible data benchmark. The drive draws a straight line and speeds through all the benchmarks without trouble.

Drive Comparison

For the purpose of drive comparison, I will be using the performance figures from both unconditioned and conditioned tests with 0% data-fill.

We got a clear winner in the overall performance table on the compressible data, the Kingston M.2 SATA left the competition in the dust with compressible data. It performed very well with incompressible as well, considering it’s only a 120GB model.