Kingston has proved to be a solid force in the SSD market in recent years. Its range of SSDs — the V300, V310, HyperX Fury and HyperX 3K — are all impressive drives that offer the user a combination of performance and value for money.
It’s the V300 SSDNow range we’re reviewing here, in particular the 120GB model. This drive has an older LSI SandForce 2281 controller that has been customized for Kingston and uses the Toshiba-built 19nm Toggle NAND flash.
It measures 69.8 x 100 x 7mm, weighs 86 grams and comes in capacities ranging from just 60GB up to 480GB — although you may be hard pressed to find a 60GB model these days.
The Sandforce controller may be considered as old technology these days, especially with more advanced Marvell offerings giving us higher capacities at better speeds, but it’s still a pretty effective workhorse. In this case, the drive offers a one million hour MTBF and a 3 year Kingston warranty.
The SandForce controller also gets some stick when it comes to performance. In our tests, the Kingston SSDNow V300 managed to score 556 MB/s in the 8192KB sequential read tests and 531 MB/s in the same write test. The 4KB tests, where the SandForce technology often left a lot to be desired, managed to score 160MB/s read and 254MB/s write. Overall, the Kingston V300 is pretty fast and will no doubt keep most home users and enthusiasts quite happy over its lifespan.
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Kingston advertises this model as the more affordable solution to blistering speeds, with extra testimonials from people from various walks of life and a stark ‘l0X Faster’ label across the packaging. It’s fast enough, don’t’ get us wrong; after all, it’s one of the fastest SSDs we’ve tested so far in this price range.
Power consumption on this drive is rated at 0.6W when idle, increasing to 1.4W when reading and 2.05W when writing. Considering it’s virtually impossible to tell exactly what an operation is doing, even when you think it’s solely writing, there’s plenty of reading going on, so we can guess that the overall maximum power usage is upwards of 2W when in full use.
Having said all that, the Kingston SSDNow V300 still represents an impressively fast and very cost effective solution to upgrade from an older hard drive. As with the other drives on test, it’s definitely more than capable of speeding the system up and lessening the power use over time.
The Kingston SSDNow V300 120GB is a good enough SSD for most users. It only costs just under $60, and it’s fast enough for the desktop user who doesn’t do too much gaming. If you want more speed and capacity, though, and you’re planning on sticking to the Kingston range of SSDs, then the HyperX 3K will be the model for you.