Kingston SSDNow UV400 480GB Solid State Drive Review

Final Thoughts
Now keep in mind this is Kingston’s entry level solid state drive, so you are not going to see crazy performance numbers. The SSDNow UV400 did however have respectible results in our tests. In ATTO Disk Benchmark we saw speeds of 560 MB/s read and 528 MB/s write and in Anvil Storage Utilities the IOPS scores were 84K read and 82K write. Not bad at all for an entry level solid state drive.

Now of course the downside to this drive, and almost every other TLC-based solid state drive is that it relies heavily on the SLC cache. Once that cache fills up the write speed of the drive drops dramatically. We saw it go from around 475 MB/s all the way down to 106 MB/s in our tests. Now this is only apparent when you are doing large writes with no idle time in between. The cache on the drive will clear itself automatically when the drive is in an idle state, but if you are doing large 6-8 GB file transfers with no idle time in between you are going to see this slow down in speed. Most users will not experience this slow down though.

Kingston sent us the SSD Upgrade Kit version of the drive. It is great to see Kingston still over this type of kit as many SSDs are just coming as a drive-only package. The SSD upgrade kit is a nice value and will only cost you around an extra $10. If you plan on using anything contained in the kit it is worth getting.

With the SSD kit aside the drive-only 480GB version of the UV400 we reviewed today is selling for $110.99 at our favorite online retailer. That puts it at $0.23 per GB, which is definitely a value price. So if you are finally looking to get an SSD to replace your mechanical hard drive the price is definitely right on the UV400. Kingston also backs the drive with a 3-year warranty. Overall ThinkComputers gives the Kingston SSDNow UV400 480GB Solid State Drive a 9 out of 10 score.

Award 9 out of 10

Pros:
– Price
– Good overall performance
– SSD Upgrade kit is nice to see
– Available in capacities up to 960GB
– 3-year warranty

Cons:
– SLC caching causes slow writes with larger transfers

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