Kingston SSDNow V+ 200 120GB SATA III SSD (Upgrade Bundle Kit) Review

It has been a while since a new Kingston release has come along and our last Kingston SSD Review was an extremely favorable one examining the Kingston HyperX Enthusiast Class SSD. It earned our Editor’s Choice Award.  In fact, I still use the very attractive HyperX mini-tool that came with that kit daily.

Today, we are going to be evaluating Kingston’s newest release, the SSDNow 120GB V+200, an SSD that like it’s bigger brother, also contains the LSI SandForce SF-2281 processor.

In fact, as has become very common in today’s SSD arena, many manufacturers have catered to the consumer by enhancing their SSD selection with two distinct classes of mainstream SSDs.  The first class uses premium synchronous or toggle mode memory modules while the second benefits the more value minded by using less expensive asynchronous memory.  In the case of Kingston, the first is definitely the HyperX while the second is the SSDNow V+200 that we are evaluating today.

The sample received for this review is the Kingston SSDNow V+200 120GB SSD with Upgrade Bundle Kit which comes with the 2.5″ SSD, a 2.5″ USB enclosure for migrating your system, a desktop adapter and mounting screws, SATA power cord and data cable as well as a DVD which contains complete hard drive cloning software to make things as easy as can be expected.

SSDNOW V+200 SSD SPECIFICATIONS

The SSDNow V+200 comes in capacities of 60, 90, 120, 240 and 480GB and are available with prices of $104.99, $139.99, $174.99, $334.99 and $679.99, consecutively; ‘Upgrade Bundle Kits’ tacking on an average of $10-$15 more for most sizes.  Depending on capacity, performance is listed as high as 535MB/s read and 480MB/s write with 85,000 IOPS at low 4k random write aligned disk access, which is common for most ‘SandForce Driven’ SSDs which the V+200 is.  This SSD comes with a standard three year warranty.

COMPONENTS

The SSDNow V+200 SSD is encased in a ‘gunmetal’ grey exterior and held together by 4 torqx security screws to which are particularly difficult to remove.  Once opened, we find a green printed circuit board (PCB) with a SATA 3 interface on one end that plugs in to the computer.  As with the Kingston HyperX, the processor is none other than the LSI SandForce SF-2281 and NAND flash memory consists of 16 modules of Intel 25nm asynchronous NAND flash memory, each chip being 8GB in capacity.

Total capacity of all modules is 128GB, however, SandForce utilizes one module of 8GB for it’s firmware and over provisioning needs which enhance performance, endurance as well as data integrity and reliability.  The final available user capacity, after formatting, is  112GB.