The V series of SSDs from Kingston all follow a similar design path and this is great as it makes for easy recognition of their position within the market.
The underside of the drive is plain with nothing but a warranty sticker that covers one of the fours screws that hold the drive together.
Like a couple of other drives we have seen recently, the V300 has a low 7mm profile to enhance its compatibility with the likes of ultrabooks.
As seen on the previous page, Kingston include a 2.5mm spacer that simply sticks onto the top of the drive for fitting into 9.5mm locations.
Looking inside the drive, we can see that Kingston have used their own branded ICs all over the board. Each of the 8GB toggle NAND flash ICs comes from Toshiba with their new 19nm design whilst the controller is a re-branded SandForce 2281.
On the lower half of the board we find eight more 8GB flash IC’s giving the drive a total capacity of 128GB, but in true SandForce fashion we find the capacity lowered to 120GB due to the over provisioning required by the controller.
It’s pricey at the moment probably because it hasn’t saturated the retail channel yet. You can easily find Kingston’s same capacity HyperX 3K going for a bit less. Hang on a while & it’s sure to drop in price. On another note Kingston always use that yucky green pcb on all of their DRAM modules, even the high end ones which can be easily noticed but on this drive they use a nicer looking blue pcb which should never be seen. Go figure.