Kingston V100 vs V Series SSD 128GB, huge difference in MHDD scan!

[stevexyz]

i just received the kingston v series 128gb ssd i ordered from buy.com today. so i went ahead did some scan to make sure it doesn't have any problem.

the program i used was the low level hd tool mhdd 4.6. to my surprise, it took much longer than my old v100 128gb to finish the scan: 13m40s vs only 52s! that's almost 16 times longer! and the average speed was 152391kb/s vs 2388021kb/s. (i was gona swap out the v100 with the v series and use the v100 on my laptop. so both drives were partitioned exactly the same way and with pretty much the same data. and they were using the same sata port when the scans were run).

that difference was huge! i almost couldn't believe my eyes. so i rescanned both drives but the results were the same. then i did some diskmarks on both drives. the difference in the benchmarks were not as big tho:

v100: 257.1/221.8 || 186.6/182.1 || 12.94/21.83 || 13.89/19.98
v series: 251.8/143.4 || 147.7/103.7 || 11.39/14.65 || 11.76/13.75

but how could the difference in mhdd scan be so big? would it mean that there might be some problem with my v series drive? or is this just normal?

 

[postmortemIA]

mhdd, from description on their site is for mechanical drives. SSD drives work differently, there are no physical sectors, and controller decides where to actually store data in NAND memory table. so any kind of software is fooled to think it knows where data is actually stored. my guess running mhdd is very intensive and bad for ssd.

 

[F1shF4t]

You won’t get any meaningful results as postmortemIA mentioned. Shouldn't be bad for the ssd, as mhdd is just reading from it.

 

[Vincent]

The Kingston V Series uses a worse controller than the V100. So I'm not surprised that the V Series is slower, but I am surprised that the difference is so large.

 

[hans007]

erm no.

the V series if you have a 425 series is the same controller as the V100. they just redid the firmware. I had an original V series 64gb for a while and that firmware had some issues from what i remember (i had to rma mine because it had problems being detected all the time on more than 1 mobo).

the V+ / V+100 also use the same controller with new firmware in the same way.

 

[stevexyz]

thx to all for your input. so maybe mhdd use some old dos algorithm that's different? and should not be used on ssd? even so, it still surprised me because the difference in the scans between the two are so big.

hans007, mine is the v 425 series. so it has the same controller as the v100? you said they just redid the firmware. so do they have the new firmware out for me to update my drive with?

 

[postmortemIA]

use some tool that does not try to read SSD on a low level, as it is futile. Crystal Disk Mark, HDTach or HDTune should be enough to compare SSDs.

 

[hans007]

thx to all for your input. so maybe mhdd use some old dos algorithm that's different? and should not be used on ssd? even so, it still surprised me because the difference in the scans between the two are so big.

hans007, mine is the v 425 series. so it has the same controller as the v100? you said they just redid the firmware. so do they have the new firmware out for me to update my drive with?

supposdly you cant just upgrade the firmware on the kingston drives. but yeah they are both jmf618 controllers.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4010/kingston-ssdnow-v-plus-100-review

first paragraph in the anandtech v+100 review explains the "update"

 

[stevexyz]

update: looks like this "brand new" ssd was not "prepared" when shipped to me. after i did some more research about ssd, i decided to do a secure erase on the v series with parted magic. then boom, the speed is up! now mhdd scan takes only 1m9s to finish! altho still a tad slower than the v100 (52s), but it's not too far off, it's well within the expected range. don't know why kingston would ship out a drive that's not really "prepared" for the consumer. it was in fact brand new factory sealed when i received it.