Kingston SSDNow V300

[Robi_g]

So here we go, this will be a short one. I bought the 240GB upgrade kit for £88 on Amazon, the last SSD I bought was a 60GB OCZ Agility 3 and that was £65, hooray for price drops.

As you can see in the pictures above, it's pretty standard stuff on the SSD side, you get a 9.5mm thickness adapter which I don't really see the point of, but it looks cheap so probably didn't add anything much to the price so I'm not fussed. The 2.5" to 3.5" mount is solid, although it would be nicer in black. You get mounting screws for the mount and the drive in the box (so 8 in total).

What makes this worth the £10 more over just the SSD on its own though is the external enclosure and cloning software. this makes it easy to upgrade a laptop with only 1 SATA data connector and means that the drive can be used as a portable one, although transfer is via USB2 so forget about the speed benefit if you use it like that. I haven't used the software yet but will be in the next few weeks so I'll update then.

The benchmarks show my 500GB WDBlue hard drive, and the Kingston V300 plugged into SATA 2 and SATA 3 ports on the motherboard. The faster results are obviously from the SATA 3 port. Of course performance will drop over time as is the case with SSDs, but I wasn't surprised that it didn't once hit the 450MB/s stated on the box. The actual R/W speed isn't massively faster than the hard drive (much less than the 10X stated on the box, but the acess times are mental and opening After Effects is no longer a long wait away.

 

So in Conclusion the V300 is very cheap for the capacity, you get a lot of useful stuff in the box and of course, a hell of a lot faster than a mechanical hard drive.

Price: 9

Performance: 7

Quality: 8

 

 

-Edit-

 

The external enclosure paints very nicely, the top is metal and the bottom is plastic, this was just done with a rattle can of white primer. I couldn't work out how to take the SSD itself apart as there weren't any visible screws (and I didn't want to break my brand new thing just yet ).

[MikeTz]

I have the V300 128GB and I can say that the same deal is for the lower models..

A lot faster than an HDD but slower that a high end SDD and everything is really snappy as with any SSD

[steffen_anywhere]

Cool! I have heard from many people that they had massive problems with this SSD, so I was careful to recommend it. It is obviously not the fastest thing in the world, but considering that the random IO is still better than with any magnetic media, it is still very good for a boot drive. Especially in notebooks which have slower 2.5" drives, the speed increase for sequential read/write would still be significant.

[atrash]

The keyword here is 'very cheap'. Any ssd will be a huge upgrade from a hdd. There's nothing wrong in suggesting a cheap and decent brand ssd to someone who is just getting used to an ssd.

[Robi_g]

Cool! I have heard from many people that they had massive problems with this SSD, so I was careful to recommend it. It is obviously not the fastest thing in the world, but considering that the random IO is still better than with any magnetic media, it is still very good for a boot drive. Especially in notebooks which have slower 2.5" drives, the speed increase for sequential read/write would still be significant.

That's exactly what it's going to be used for after a short stint in my desktop, getting a cheap laptop for uni then putting this in it to perk things up a bit.

[MrTomnus]

Nice review I have the 128GB model of the SSD and I have to say it's still nice and speedy - it boots my PC in about 12 seconds! Very good for the price, and if you take good care of it you should get a lot of life out of it.

[GamerDude]

Hey, I got the 128GB version recently for a PII X6 1100T + Asus Crosshair IV Formula build. Pretty cheap yet snappy little SSD. I'd definitely recommend this badboy for anyone looking for a nice budget SSD.

[flibberdipper]

I got the baseline 840 EVO (that doesn't come with that adapter, since I didn't think I would need it) and I'm glad I just got the baseline. There is no point in the adapter. I can shake the shit out of my netbook, and nothing inside of it works.

 

But I digress, good review, but the pictures for the benchmarks are too small to read, even when you click on them.

[Robi_g]

but the pictures for the benchmarks are too small to read, even when you click on them.

It should take you to photobucket where they're nice and big.

 

But in case it isn't working, here are the main ones.

WD HDD: Average = 100MB/s Access time = 16ms

Kingston on SATA3: Average = 245MB/s Access time = 0.1ms

[flibberdipper]

It should take you to photobucket where they're nice and big.

 

But in case it isn't working, here are the main ones.

WD HDD: Average = 100MB/s Access time = 16ms

Kingston on SATA3: Average = 245MB/s Access time = 0.1ms

Nope. The benchmark ones don't get bigger. Link

 

But thanks for telling me the stats. I do appreciate it. SSD shopping for my mom... Woo-hoo.

[GamerDude]

Nope. The benchmark ones don't get bigger. Link

 

But thanks for telling me the stats. I do appreciate it. SSD shopping for my mom... Woo-hoo.

And if you can get that 300V for cheap, grab it! I bought it exactly for that reason, yeah, I know it's slower than the Corsair SSD's I have in my two main systems, but it's still snappy enough, besides, I use it as an OS SSD only, so it's just perfect for me.

[deviant88]

Owner of 128gb v300 couldnt be more happy after the OCZ vertex2 60gb fail, and HDD headache

[ShadowCaptain]

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-250GB-Basic-Solid-State/dp/B00E391OX6/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1405680428&sr=8-1&keywords=840+evo

 

250 840 evo is currently £82 cheaper on amazon

[harrynowl]

Nice review

 

I used the 60Gb one (all that was needed- linux box) for my cousin and it was good (was like £38).

 

I read about them swapping NAND for lower performance stuff though after receiving favorable reviews on the 'revision 1'