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REPORT ANALYSIS AND FINAL THOUGHTS
The Kingston SSDVNow SSD enters the market as the first SSD to use new Toshiba 19nm Toggle mode DDR memory paired with the SandForce SF-2281 FSP. We are curious as to how many similar SSDs we may see introduced in the future for two reasons as the SF-2281 is not your off the shelf FSP and was customized specifically for Kingston. In other words, just as we have seen so many times before with manufacturers such as OCZ and Crucial, this controller is the efforts of both Kingston and LSI SandForce together and, even if the work is reflective of firmware alone, it is proprietary to Kingston.
Performance for the SSDNow V300 is incredible and our evaluation displayed results well above posted specifications. It’s read and write performance is excess of 500MB/s is typical LSI SandForce and it is very encouraging to see a first release SSD (19nm/SF-2281 pairing) place in the upper tier of the SSDs we have tested to date.
This SSD is directed at the consumer making the transition and exterior branding is obvious of such. Kingston goes much further though by including a migration video as well as another DVD that has a step by step guide along with the Acronis True Image HD Cloning Software. If we were to pick at anything, it might be the three year warranty, whereas, five is becoming comonplace as well as the fact that we believe each and every SSD should have the full migration package included and complementary.
Pricing is on par with most, although sub-$100 120/128GB SSDs and sub-$200 240/256GB SSDs are being seen more frequently. The increase from the SSD alone to the full migration kit is only about $10 which is cheaper than we usually see and this complate package is definitely the best complete HDD to SSD upgrade that wer have seen to date. Would we refer those who have to include the SSD migration in their upgrade to the SSDNow V300? Absolutely! Kingston even throws in complementary tech support!
OPTIMIZED TESTING
Just as a show of good measure, let’s see how this drive performs if we fine tune our systems power management settings in BIOS:
We don’t typically display optimized settings as we feel it important that the results we display can be duplicated by anyone. Examining the optimized CDM score here, we see definite improvement in all transfer speeds and the low 4k write result of 135MB/s is one of the fastest we have seen yet.
The question then becomes on of whether this would be identifiable in typical use, or even in simulated reality testing. let’s take a new look at PCMark Vantage with the BIOS optimized:
The optimized Total Score of 79869 with a high transfer speed of 465MB/s is incredible.
All in all, kudos to Kingston and LSI SandForce for the great new SSD introduction and we are happy to award our Innovation Award to the SSDNow V300.
Les,
What exact optimizations did you make in BIOS?
Is there anything you recommend doing on a Gigabyte Z77 UEFI BIOS without disabling the SLEEP function?
Thanks
work optimizations on hyperx 3k ????
I’m having issues installing an operating system on the SSD. Doesn’t show up in diskpart or windows disk manager, tried it by external enclosure and swapping it out for my laptop HDD. Shows up in BIOS, but not in disk manager or diskpart when using windows 7 setup cd and windows 7 setup USB.
It could be defective, but statistically most issues are human ones or hardware incompatibilities.
I am not sure where you have gone with this. Have you tried a simple install to check if the SSD was recognized during the W7 installation process? I have installed ….crap must be over a thousand W7 systems by now…and have never encountered a situation where the drive was recognized in the bios but not during initial installation.
Nevermind, fixed it.
Next question is how’d you tweak to get the final performance you did?
Ok, but what was the issue?
hello please how to tweak to get the final performance you did?
Les, great article. One question though… why do you state “112 GB” after formatting? This is a continued misrepresentation of hard drive advertising. As you probably know, manufacturers sell drives using a base-10 system (1 GB = 10^9 bytes), whereas Windows sees the size with base-2 (1 GiB = 2^30 bytes), now known as “Gibibytes” or GiB to avoid confusion. This conversion leaves us at 111.75 GiB from 120 GB, what you call the difference due to formatting.
I apologize if I sound a bit frustrated but we explain things in a VERY simple way and using GiB does nothing more than to confuse the consumer CONSIDERABLY. It is a VERY simple method to explain the RAW total, advertised total and available total as we do, especially since 99.99999% of consumers haven’t a clue as to what you speak. They JUST want to know how much space is available. Thanks ahead Dan!
I have two 120GB V300s.
The first has 505 firmware which works at it should.
The second has 506 firmware and is way slower.
Could you check a new one with 506 to see if there are differences or is something wrong with mine?
I have same issue, 506 is significantly slower. Can someone check it? Or retest with new FW will be more than helpful.
For me the AS SSD numbers (on SATA 2) are the following Read | Write 505,506.
Seq 256 , 175 | 158 , 133
4K 14 , 11 | 45 , 26
4K-64 123 , 91 | 109 , 114
Acc 0.138 , 0.195 | 0.321 , 0.405
Here is you answer….
https://media.kingston.com/support/downloads/V300_Benchmark_Brief_MKF_586.pdf
A follow-up review on the current asynchronous version might be helpful.
I think this review needs to be updated to reflect how Kingston changed the ssd from what they sent out for reviewing to what is being sold now. It’s a big story that this website should have caught onto but it appears not. Instead I shall share with you a link to some up to date information.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/7763/an-update-to-kingston-ssdnow-v300-a-switch-to-slower-micron-nand