Kingston SSDNow V300 120GB SSD Review

Since Kingston introduced the V series of drives a few years ago, the V has always stood for Value and this by all means stands true to this drive. The V300 is the fastest V series drive that we have seen to date (as one would expect) and along with a comprehensive bundle & competitive price tag, its no wonder that these are becoming the drives of choice for many first time users that want to take the step over to the world of SSD storage.

With a customised SandForce controller at the heart, there are the associated downsides, namely the lowered capacity as a consequence of over provisioning  as required by design and also the drop in write speed when working with incompressible data. For this series of drives however, I wouldn’t mark this as a huge negative as it has never been designed and built to be an all round top performer. On a similar level, this controller isn’t totally off the shelf in its design and hence the reason for the Kingston mark on the chip to signify its proprietary build.

One area that we really have to give this drive a huge level of credit is its IOPs performance. We’ve never seen a drive until now perform so close to its rated levels at both read and write and even then it went that little bit further just to prove a point. As always with results that look too good to be true, we did check our configuration and ran the test multiple times to to ensure that it was not a one-off fluke, but this really is what the drive had to give.

When it comes to day to day use in the home or work place with generic office applications and internet browsing for example (in other words, no drive intensive work loads such as video rendering), one would be hard pushed to find any reason to get anything more in terms of performance as after all, the difference in performance is going to be hard to realistically notice.

Rounding off on price, the V300 kit that we’ve looked at today can be found for around £80 with the complete bundle of fitting kits. This gives it a solid price point to to put things into raw perspective with accessories aside, the vanilla packed drive can be found for as little as £70 giving it a highly affordable rate of ~60p/GB for the 120GB model, proving once again value is where this drive shines.

On the whole, the V300 brings a new lease of life to the V-series of drives that Kingston has to offer and now also offers up a better level of performance with the same highly competitive price point for the every day user. With out a doubt, this is worthy of our Bang for Buck award.