What's the general concensus here?

[Gbuddai]

So I tend to recommend the Kingston V300 120GB SSD for budget builds. However I seem to receive some backlash from others saying that they're trash SSDs. I see Linus using Kingston SSDs fairly often in some of his builds. Basically what I'm asking is; Is the Kingston V300 120GB SSD really that bad?

[Herman Mcpootis]

Yes. kingston did a bait and switch for the v300. The review units were decent IIRC, but the units consumers get were almost as slow as a mechanical harddrive.

[Oshino Shinobu]

It's the V300 series specifically. Kingston's other drives are generally good. 

 

The V300 drives used to be good, but they did a couple of revisions that halved the performance of the drives, then another revision improved it a little, but they're still significantly slower than other SSDs. They basically swapped out the NAND quietly, hoping no-one would notice. 

 

At a similar price range, the SanDisk SSD Plus and Adata SP550 are better options. 

[Mira Yurizaki]

29 minutes ago, Gbuddai said:

So I tend to recommend the Kingston V300 120GB SSD for budget builds. However I seem to receive some backlash from others saying that they're trash SSDs. I see Linus using Kingston SSDs fairly often in some of his builds. Basically what I'm asking is; Is the Kingston V300 120GB SSD really that bad?

They switched to slower NAND memory which according to Anandtech, drops the read/write speed to ~150MB/s read and 80MB/s~ write. Hard drives can perform faster than this.

[pwn_intended]

I have been advocating for the v300 on this forum for the last 2+ years. I have deployed at least 7 of them in various computers for myself and friends without any problems. I am not sure which versions they were, but they have all performed well and never had a problem with any of them. If you find one at a a really cheap price, go for it. Yes, they aren't as fast as some other SSD's, but no, they are not anywhere near as slow as mechanical drives. In my own tests, I was getting speeds of around 350MB/s.

 

At the end of the day, its a decent SSD for the price, but you do get what you pay for.

[Oshino Shinobu]

3 minutes ago, pwn_intended said:

I have been advocating for the v300 on this forum for the last 2+ years. I have deployed at least 7 of them in various computers for myself and friends without any problems. I am not sure which versions they were, but they have all performed well and never had a problem with any of them. If you find one at a a really cheap price, go for it. Yes, they aren't as fast as some other SSD's, but no, they are not anywhere near as slow as mechanical drives. In my own tests, I was getting speeds of around 350MB/s.

 

At the end of the day, its a decent SSD for the price, but you do get what you pay for.

For the price, it's really not that great. There are cheaper or same priced options that perform better. 

 

They're not as slow as mechanical drives, but there's not really any reason to go for one where there are multiple better options.