Kingston SSDNow V300 120GB Solid State Drive Review

Final Thoughts
I think these days many people choose an SSD based on the capacity of the drive vs the overall price.  The SSDNow V300 enters the market at a very competitive price for the capacity you get.  A quick look on Amazon shows the 120GB version of the V300 selling for around $100 with the Desktop Upgrade Kit being about $20 more.  This definitely brings the cost of this SSD to under $1/GB, which makes they upgrade to an SSD all the much easier.

In no way is this the fastest solid state drive out there and it does not claim to be either.  Kingston advertises this drive with read and write speeds of 450MB/s.  While that may not be the fastest as most SATA 6GB/s drives claim 500-550MB/s that still is much faster than your normal hard drive.  The average user is not going to be able to tell the difference between 450MB/s and 500MB/s, but they will be able to tell the difference if using the V300 compared to a normal hard drive.  Also keep in mind the V300 performed well above the 450MB/s in many of our tests.

This is Kingston’s first drive to use Toshiba’s 19nm toggle mode MLC flash and it seems to be a good combination.  Also Kingston claims the SandForce SF-2281 chip on the V300 was designed specifically for Kingston.  Even if that is only on a Firmware level the drive still exceeded our expectations and of course firmware updates could make the drive perform even better.

Since this is a SandForce-based drive so you do get the added features that the SandForce SF-2281 controller offers. The drive will do real-time loss-less compression. This is why there is no need for a cache chip, but also means less writes to the data cells. RAISE (Redundant Array of Independent Silicon Elements) is a term we have heard a lot with these new drives. So on top of ECC for data protection RAISE adds another level of security. This drive also supports TRIM as almost all solid state drives do these days.

All in all Kingston has put out another quality solid state drive.  Did I mention this drive is only 7mm thick?  That means it is the perfect upgrade for your Ultrabook!  Also this is a great drive for a beginner as it comes with an installation DVD.  The only downside to this drive would have to be the 3 year warranty.  While 3 years seems to be enough the industry is moving towards 5 year warranties on solid state drives.  Overall ThinkComputers gives the Kingston SSDNow V300 120GB Solid State Drive a 9 out of 10 score and our Recommended Award!

rating9 10 small TC award recommended small

Pros:
– Great performance
– Accessories bundle
– Price

Cons:
– Would have liked to see a 5 year warranty

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