Kingston SSDNow V300 240GB Review and Test

The Kingston SSDNow V300 has been on the market longer than any of the other SSDs on test, being released back in 2013 and based on SandForce’s aging SF-2281 controller. It’s joined by Toshiba 19nm MLC NAND chips, which are built on 64Gb packages, while the warranty is pegged at three years, which is typical of entry-level SSDs.

However, the knock-on effect of the V300’s maturity is a very low price. At 31p per gigabyte, only Crucial’s larger BX100 drives offer a cheaper cost per gigabyte. As with the OCZ Arc 100 (above), the V300 doesn’t handle synthetic tests well, languishing at the bottom of the charts for sequential write speeds, managing just 226.2MB/sec in CrystalDiskMark and 217.4MB/sec in AS SSD. It’s right at the bottom for 4KB random reads in AS SSD as well, with its 19.4MB/sec speed being less than half the 44.6MB/sec from Samsung’s 850 Evo, and 50 per cent less than Crucial’s BX100.

But the real-world performance traces in PCMark 8 tell a different story; with a V300 you’ll still enjoy all the usual benefits of an SSD. Windows boots in just 11.54 seconds, which is far better than even the fastest hard disk, and while the V300 is towards the bottom of the charts in the Photoshop Heavy and Microsoft Word tests, the differences between the fastest drives and the V300 are less dramatic in real-world tests.

However, the 250GB Crucial BX100 costs just £4 more, and offers better performance. The V300 isn’t bad for the money – it’s just up against stiff competition.

VERDICT

Fine as an entry-level drive, but Crucial’s BX100 offers more bang for your buck.

Overall Score: 82