Kingston SSDNow V300 120GB SATA 3.0 SSD

[prodigy_]

It is cheap and a lot faster than a mechanical hard disk drive.

Not as much faster as you think. Last year we bought V300's to upgrade some old Lenovo laptops. And I don't know how Michael got those test results but pretty much any sequential reads benchmark (AS-SSD for example) will show something utterly disappointing. About 150-170 MB/s on SATA-2 controllers (3 Gbps). I can't recall what exactly we got testing them on SATA-3 (6 Gbps) but it was under 350 MB/s as well. Terrible performance, even for cheap drives. I wrote to Kingston support and they replied it was normal.

[Delgarde]

That's very nice to hear. That's one of the SSD models I was considering as well, but unfortunately the store was out of stock...

It seems to be the most popular model these days... was thinking of getting one myself. By their official numbers, it should be one of the better performing drives while still relatively cheap, so I'll be interested in seeing this review.

[prodigy_]

Most SSDs are garbage
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/1...flash-ssd-data

/sigh

Did you the paper linked in that post? What they did was essentially testing how the drives would respond to 3000 power failures in a row. Seriously, three-freaking-key. If you really care about data integrity, one is too many (that's why you'll never see a server rack without a UPS standing next to it).

SSDs are the best thing that happened to personal computing since cheap RAM.

[Licaon]

I wrote to Kingston support and they replied it was normal.

They advertise compressible testing that always yields high throughput, also see my post above.

[V10lator]

I don't know how Michael got those test results

He has another one than you:

Regarding Kingston V300 read this post by Maxgadgetguy: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answer....html#11492819

[Licaon]

He has another one than you:

what?

[prodigy_]

They advertise compressible testing that always yields high throughput, also see my post above.

IDK, on my own Intel 520 I get 550 MB/s sequential reads in AS-SSD. Both drives have the same SandForce SF-2281 controller. What gives?

[V10lator]

what?

Did you read the link you posted? There are two versions of this SSD available and most likely Michael has other results cause he has the Taiwan version while prodigy_ has the China one. In fact that's exactly what the link says:

v5.0.5 Sandforce version made in Taiwan. This unit will always benchmark just fine

dramatic difference in performance between China or Taiwan-made models

[Licaon]

IDK, on my own Intel 520 I get 550 MB/s sequential reads in AS-SSD. Both drives have the same SandForce SF-2281 controller. What gives?

read that link

Did you read the link you posted?

I did not understand what you said, not what the link I posted said, mmkay?

[prodigy_]

most likely Michael has other results cause he has the Taiwan version while prodigy_

That's quite possible but still very annoying. I already posted results from AS-SSD but I also tried HD Tune and got only 145 MB/s sequential read speed. To put this into perspective, you can get 120 MB/s from a good HDD. And in real life environment... well, these Kingston V300 drives feel somewhat faster than HDDs but not even close to Crucial m4, for example (on the same hardware).

So I wouldn't recommend Kingston. If you need something cheap and don't really care about write speed, go for Crucial M500.