Kingston SSDNow V300 Review - 120GB

In this Kingston SSDNow V300 Review, we are going to see if the V300, an old SSD, still holds the value position or not? The SSDNow series f...

In this Kingston SSDNow V300 Review, we are going to see if the V300, an old SSD, still holds the value position or not?

The SSDNow series from Kingston caters the entry-level and mainstream segment with offerings from 60GB to 480GB. They are positioned to provide decent performance without breaking the bank.

Today we have the 120GB V300 with us. It is an old drive now and new UV400 lineup was introduced in replacement. But it is still available in stocks and sometimes at a good discount. Therefore, we will see if this drive can perform to its limit?

Thanks to Kingston India for the SSDNow V300 Review sample.

The Drive



Kingston describes its V300 as follows-

V300:

Ideal for consumers, this entry-level SSD delivers a good mix of price and performance. It's designed for HDD replacement, with a balance between performance and entry-level pricing.

First of all, let us talk about the drive. The drive that we are looking today, was one of the first variants which came with the 19nm Toshiba MLC NAND and a custom SandForce SF-2281 controller. Afterward, 20nm chips Micron were used.



v300 desktop bundle

This drive is meant as stepping stone for systems with an aging hard drive. It will not satisfy the needs of the enthusiasts but for the majority of users, it will suffice.

It is a standard 7mm drive with metal casing and should fit most laptops. Finally, it provides 111.8GB of usable space after formatting. Here are the complete specs-



As you can clearly see, Kingston provides baseline numbers for major SSD benchmarking software. So it will be easy to judge if the V300 will stay true to its numbers or not. Spoiler: It's OKAY!

Test System and Methodology

Following Benchmark-Tools were used for the review-

ATTO Disk
AS SSD
AnvilPro
AIDA64 Disk Benchmark
CrystalDiskMark

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System-

Kingston SSDNow V300 120GB (firmware- 60AABBF0-33205)
i5 6600K - Stock
Asus H110m-K
Crucial DDR4 8GB 2133MHz
Windows 10 Pro w/ latest updates
Cooler Master Silent Pro M 700w



Each test was conducted after a full restart and on the desktop. No background applications were running except for the usual Windows Processes. Tests were conducted after formatting the drive. The SSD was in the case with closed panels.

ATTO Disk

First, we have the ATTO Disk Benchmark. It is a trusted benchmark tool for storage and is great if you want to recreate the results advertised. It presents the data in a readable graph with both IOPS and MB/s. The test uses compressible data, so the drives with compression favoring technology show good numbers.

The test was conducted with Queue Depth of 4 and a test length of 256MB.

The drive showed good results here because of the compression favoring controller. It reached its advertised speed at 128KB block size.



AS SSD

AS SSD is a dedicated SSD benchmarking tool which includes three test scenarios. It uses a large (min 1GB) incompressible file for its test. The 4K-64 corresponds to the 4K procedure except that the read and write operations are distributed to 64 threads.

This is a difficult test to crack because it taxes the SSD with incompressible data. The test was done with all the default settings.

The drive starts to show its weakness in the incompressible tests. As you can see the speeds drop drastically here compared to the previous test. But the 4K numbers are okay for the price. The sequential write numbers are poor for this drive.



The Copy test tries to emulate a real world use case scenario. The drive scored an average of 119MB/s for day to day operations.



The Compression test shows how the drive fares with incompressible and compressible data read and write. The drive shows good results for compression data while hitting a minimum write speed of 72MB/s at around 20% compression.

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Anvil Storage Utilities

AnvilPro is a powerful benchmarking tool for both hard drives and SSDs. It shows results in all formats including access time and IOPS. It allows full control over the data compression levels and also includes an endurance test to test performance degradation over time.

I conducted the test with a 1GB test file and the applications preset with 46% compression rate. It represents an average real world usage which lies in between compressible and incompressible data.

The test is consistent with the previous results. The read speeds are okay but the write speeds are less than stellar.



AIDA64 Disk Benchmark

AIDA64 is mainly a diagnostic tool with multi-threaded benchmarking and stress-testing capabilities but it also includes a disk benchmark. This test was designed mainly for HDDs and optical drives but SSDs can still be benched on it.

It's mainly an automated test. I used the Random Read and Write tests with both 4K and a more generous 256k block size.



4K random write



256K Random Write



4K Random Read



256K Random Read

The results, again, are consistent. You can see how the increase in block size helps in speed.

CrystalDiskMark

CrystaldiskMark is a famous storage benchmark that offers simple and dependable results for both SSDs and HDDs. It provides options for both compressible and incompressible data and also selectable queue depths.

I conducted two tests with both compressible data and incompressible data at 4 and 32 queue depths. I used 1GB test file with 5-second intervals.





Wrap Up

There's not much to say about the results. The results speak for themselves. This SSDNow V300 Review somehow proves that why entry level products exist.

The product barely crosses the speeds what the manufacturer advertise. With decent read speeds and disappointing write speeds with incompressible data, it can only be recommended for general media consumption and casual gaming. Because anything more than that will be too much for the drive.

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To conclude, Kingston didn't have anything new with the V300, consequently, there were and are far faster (and cheaper) drives available elsewhere. Rather, just get the newer UV400 series or the HyperX range if you would like to go for Kingston. Samsung and Crucial provide good options too.

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