Select Page 1 - Introduction 2 - Specifications - Warranty - Availability 3 - Packaging & Build 4 - SSD Test System 5 - Synthetic Benchmarks 6 - PCMark Vantage 7 - PCMark 7 8 - Iometer & Steady State Testing 9 - AS SSD and Power Testing 10 - Conclusion

Date: Monday , January 28, 2013 Author: Hugh Briggs Editor: Kyle Bennett

Kingston SSDNow V300 120GB SSD Review The Kingston SSDNow V300 is yet another value-oriented SSD in Kingston's wildly successful line of mainstream solid state drives. With the pressures of TLC SSDs squeezing the value market we take a look and see if a standard MLC SSD with 19nm Toshiba Toggle NAND and an SF-2281 processor can keep up with the changing times.

AS SSD is the premier SSD only benchmark. Used widely, it does a good job of keeping the results simple, yet relevant. The benchmark tests with incompressible data, so it doesn't always give a fair shake to drives that rely upon compression for speed.

AS SSD includes a compression benchmark built into the utility. This does an excellent job of addressing the performance with varying levels of compression. It should be taken into consideration that AS SSD measures latency at a 512b file size, when 4k QD1 is actually the industry accepted method.

The AS SSD benchmark illustrates the lower performed with incompressible data that all SandForce drives exhibit. The sequential write speed is considerably lower than the speeds we witnessed in the HDTune testing.

AS SSD Write testing highlights one of the undesirable characteristics of smaller capacity SSDs: lower write speed

AS SSD Read measurements reflect the good incompressible sequential speed, but also illustrates that high random loading will suffer from having fewer dice to spread the commands across.

AS SSD Copy benchmark illustrates the speed of processing various files in a copy scenario. The V300 performs well in this real-world emulation of incompressible file usage.

AS SSD Compression testing illustrates the performance of the SSD at varying levels of compression.

Power Testing is very important, as the lower power appetite for SSDs is a big motivator for users with mobile devices, such as laptops and notebooks, to purchase a new SSD. The promise of longer battery life, while not always guaranteed, is very tempting for many users. We have tested the SSDs at various settings, with high QD (32) to show the maximum power draw for each scenario. More often than not for mundane tasks such as surfing the net the SSD will be very close to idle power.

The Kingston SSDNow V300 SSD scores well across the gamut of tests, though we must take into consideration that lower capacity results in less NAND that needs powered. The power results do reflect that this SSD would be a good choice for a notebook or laptop.