Kingston has quite a range of SSDs, mSATAs and M.2 drives in its impressive catalogue. Although the mSATA standard may not be quite as popular as it once was, it’s still a healthy business line for the company, falling under the SSD System Builder category.
The mS200 range, which is the mSATA branch of the SSDNow products, comes in a variety of different capacities. From 30GB to 60GB, 120GB, 240GB and 480GB, there’s something for everyone.
The 120GB mSATA model number we have here goes by the name SMS200S3/120G and costs in the region of £50. It has an LSI Sandforce 2241 controller, with Toshiba-made 19nm Toggle NAND, designed for shock resistance and low power consumption, along with a data transfer life of around 93TB or an MTTF of 1,000,000 hours – which we think is quite a lot.
The drive supports S.M.A.R.T., Trim and Intel’s SRT (Smart Response Technology), whereby you can combine this and a standard hard drive, with the SSD acting more like a fast access cache for the most used programs and data.
To get a measure of the performance of the drive, we used the ever faithful ATTO; it may be looking a little long in the tooth these days, but it gives a good idea as to how well the driver performs with different file sizes.
The 8192KB file transfer recorded a score of 560MB/s read and 534MB/s write. The smaller 4KB file size read benchmark came back with 159MB/s, whereas the write was 255MB/s – both of which are decent numbers. We did notice that the LSI 2241 controller used was the slightly underpowered four-channel version, as opposed to the more common 2281 eightchannel controller. The 2281 would have produced a better throughput result on the benchmark, but according to Kingston it uses far more power, and the idea here was to create a low-powered storage device, hence the 2241 controller.
However, with read and write benchmark scores in the 500s for the bigger file size, there’s not much to complain about. Considering this drive
will only set you back £50, it’s certainly nothing to be too worried over.
In terms of the real-world measurement, our Windows 10 PC booted up to the desktop in around seven seconds. We imagine that if you were to use a Linux distro or even a more customised and streamlined version of Windows, that number could very well be halved.
Overall, we were quite happy with the Kingston SSDNow 120GB mSATA drive. It’s quick enough, seems to be designed well enough to avoid data loss, and it’s certainly affordable. And since it goes up to 480GB, there’s also a decent amount of storage available for both desktop and laptop users.