Kingston SSDNow V-Series Review: 30GB

Results Analysis

We never expected the Kingston SSDNow V-Series would yield cutting-edge results, but it does yield some SSD benefits in a few areas, such as read performance. However, it also exhibits unwelcome behaviour such as random write stuttering, a problem we had thought was long past. Overall, the picture looks at best, not great.

The Crucial C300 64GB was twice as fast as the Kingston in sequential read and write numbers, and it was 65 per cent faster in game loading times. The Kingston drive was actually a second slower than a 1TB Samsung SpinPoint F3 hard disk in STALKER too.

To make matters worse, the Iometer numbers are particularly poor for the Kingston - the Crucial C300 64GB stomped all over it with over a six times the read performance. Despite having dedicated cache memory, the Kingston drive stuttered, with a massive 800ms maximum random write latency; the Kingston barely scraped 1MB/sec random read, versus an impressive 48MB/sec from the C300. There's just no contest.

Conclusion

It usually turns out that you get what you pay for: if you can’t budget for more than the cheapest SSD and absolutely need the ruggedness and silence of such as device (rather than performance), then the Kingston drive wins by default as the cheapest SSD we can find.

However for less than twice the price you get morethan twice the SSD with the Crucial C300 64GB. It's not often that we can make that statement - you don't get over twice the gaming performance from adding a second graphics card or a doubling the number of CPU cores, for example.

While the Kingston V-Series 30GB might have TRIM support and a tiny PCB, the 27.9GB of formatted space is barely enough for an install of Windows 7, or two games. And at £2.29/formatted GB, the Kingston isn’t as good value as the Crucial’s £1.92/formatted GB. All of which reinforces that the Crucial C300 64GB is the best cheap SSD that we’ve seen, and worth stretching to even if you’re on a tight budget. If the C300 isn’t viable, then you’ll have to stick with a fast hard disk such as the 1TB SpinPoint F3 or 2TB Western Digital Caviar Black.

• Performance
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• 5/10

• Features
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• 6/10

• Value
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• 5/10

• Overall
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• 6/10

Score Guide