Kingston is one of the key brands in the solid state drive market, and we have looked at quite a few of their offerings over the short history of this type of storage media. This review is going to look at a 120GB unit from their SSDNow V300 series; model number SV300S3N7A/120G.



The Kingston SSDNow V300 series 120GB SATA III SSD being reviewed here was provided in a "notebook bundle kit", which includes accessories to make installation in a notebook computer extremely easy. You can also buy this drive in a desktop bundle kit, as well as without extra accessories in order to save a few dollars.

With advertised compressible sequential read and write speeds of 450MB/s, it will be interesting to investigate how well the V300 series performs. Before getting to that, let's check out some published data on the drive, as taken from the official product page on the Kingston website.

Features and Specifications:

The primary features of the Kingston SSDNow V300 include the LSI SandForce controller, free data migration software (Acronis True Image), and the notebook upgrade kit which includes a 2.5" USB 2.0 enclosure for the old hard drive or ssd that will be cloned.

» Form Factor (inch) - 2.5
» Interface - SATA Rev 3.0
» Capacity (GB) - 120
» Sequential Reads (MB/s) - 450
» Sequential Writes (MB/s) - 450
» Max. Random 4k Read (IOPS) - 85,000
» Max. Random 4k Write (IOPS) - 55,000
» Power Consumption (W) - 0.64 idle, 1.42 read, 2.05 write
» Operating Temperatures (deg C) - 0~70
» Dimensions (mm) - 70 x 100 x 7
» Weight (g) - 86
» Life Expectancy (MTBF, hours) - 1 million
» Warranty (years) - 3
» Total Bytes Written (TB) - 64

Note: SSDs tend to perform slower as storage capacities increase and the data from Kingston supports this. This data shows the 240GB model of the V300 performs approximately 28% (17,000 IOPS) slower in random 4K writes compared to the smallest available 60GB model.