In House Review - Kingston SSDNow V300 120GB SSD

[Ian]

CDRLabs has taken an in depth look at Kingston's new SSDNow V300 solid state drive. Designed for cost-conscious consumers looking to upgrade their existing desktop or notebook PC, the V300 is 10x faster than a 7200RPM hard-disk drive. It is powered by an LSI SandForce Flash Storage Processor (FSP) solution customized for Kingston, and optimized for industry-leading 19nm NAND flash memory to deliver sequential read and write speeds of up to 450MB/s.


Kingston SSDNow V300 120GB Solid State Drive

[Scour]

Oops, don´t get it

Did you review a Samsung or Kingston drive?

[Ian]

Ooops.. fixed.

[Scour]

Not a High-Power-SSD but in the past Kingston had reliable drives. And the V300 offers a good price

[Ian]

The V300 was a pleasant surprise. I'm not sure why they rated its read and write speeds at 450 MB/s when its clearly capable of more. Maybe they didn't want to compete with the HyperX 3K?

[Scour]

Not sure.
The V300 is much slower than the 3K in writing of non-compressable data. With hghly compressable data theres no much difference for SF-drives. Even the not-so-fast V+200 shows in Atto over 500MB/s read/write sequential.

At least I don´t know whether teh V300 uses cheaper NANDs than the 3K (and 3K use cheaper NANDs than the "normal" Hyper X )

[Ian]

Not sure.
The V300 is much slower than the 3K in writing of non-compressable data.

That may be because its a 120GB drive. It would be interesting to see what the 240GB version could do. They're typically faster than their 120GB counterparts.

The lifespan of the NAND in the V300 is definitely shorter. The TBW (total bytes written) for the 120GB V300 is 64TB where the 120GB HyperX 3K is 76.8TB. The original 120GB HyperX was 128TB.

[Scour]

Ah, ok, I saw a 240GB 3K in a test

64TB is less than a TLC SSD 840 can do. I hope the lifespans in real are much bigger than in the specs

[Ian]

Whats the TBW for the SSD 840? I've heard so many people talking about the longevity of TLC that I figured it was less.

[Scour]

I don´t know the specs, but here are many crazy ppl who write day on night on SSDs

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/sho ... ost5163560

No competion for good MLC-drives

[Ian]

You may want to read this post before buying one of these. It looks like Kingston changed the type of NAND from synchronous to asynchronous and the sequential read speeds aren't nearly as good.

http://www.overclock.net/t/1457629/psa- ... y-kingston

[Scour]

Yeah, I heard some months ago that Kingston changed the NAND in V300. This is shitty, I liked Kingston because their drives are reliable. OK, maybe the newer series still also reliable but the shown speeds are not bad, it´s awful.

But still wonder about the read speeds, the older series like 200+ also used asynchronous NAND, but the read speeds were ok, only the write speeds suffered.

But atm in Germany the cheapest 240GB-SSD is Crucial M500, didn´t recommend a more expensive Kingston or Samsung