Kingston SSD Now 300V 120GB Review - www.impulsegamer.com -

Although solid-state drives are more expensive than traditional SATA hard drives, the price of SSD's are coming down and the 120GB model retails for around $120AUD (March 2013), however we have found it for under $100 online. With that said, the SSD Now 300V is the perfect entry level SSD.

In terms of specifications, this current drive uses the Sandforce controller with 19nm NAND architecture, read/write speeds of up to 450MB/s, random read/write IOPs of 85,000/60,000 and a MTBF lifespan of 1,000,000 which equates to a relatively fast drive. The drive also comes with a 3-year warranty to ensure some additional piece of mind. And as you can see from the specifications of the drive below, the SSD Now 300 V is no slouch when it comes to performance!

Specifications:

Form factor: 2.5"
Interface: SATA Rev. 3.0 (6Gb/s) – backwards compatible to SATA Rev. 2.0
Capacities: 60GB, 120GB, 240GB
Sequential Reads: SATA Rev. 3.0 up to: 450MB/s
Sequential Writes: SATA Rev. 3.0 up to: 450MB/s
Maximum Random 4k Read/Write: 60GB — up to 85,000/ up to 60,000 IOPS, 120GB — up to 85,000 / up to 55,000 IOPS, 240GB — up to 85,000 / up to 43,000 IOPS
PCMARK® Vantage HDD Suite Score: 60GB: 39,000, 120GB: 49,000, 240GB: 57,000
Power Consumption: 0.640W Idle / 1.423 W Read / 2.052 W Write
Storage temperatures: -40 to 85°C
Operating temperatures: 0 to 70°C
Dimensions: 69.8mm x 100.1mm x 7mm
Weight: 86g
Vibration operating: 2.17G Peak (7–800Hz)
Vibration non-operating: 20G Peak (10–2000Hz)
Life expectancy: 1 million hours MTBF
Warranty/support: Three-year warranty with free technical support
Total Bytes Written (TBW): 60GB: 32TB, 120GB: 64TB, 240GB: 128TB

We tested the Kingston SSD Now 300V with our gaming rig from last year that includes the following parts;

Installing the Now 300V was a breeze and Kingston ensure that the user has everything they need to successfully install the unit into their system such as the mounting hardware and software. Another great feature of the 300V is that it comes with cloning software so you can easily clone your current drive to the SSD. We did test the Kingston clone software, however for our tests we used a fresh install of Windows 7.

In terms of cloning, once the drive is installed, you just run the cloning the software and in under 10 minutes, we had our other drive cloned onto the new SSD Now 300 V. It was that simple. Booting up in Windows 7 on the fresh system took around 25 seconds and shutting down was done under 5 seconds on our non cloned system. On the clones system, Windows 7 booted at 28 seconds and shutdown at 6 seconds. While using the drive on a day by day basis, we did notice a considerable difference in how fast programs opened on this drive and just basic copying.

The first test for the 300V was ATTO Disk Benchmark which is one of the world's most popular benchmarking tools. As you can see from the results below, the drive produced some impressive speeds in both read/write tests. Compared to the previous Kingston drive, the 200, the difference was huge.

Crystal Disk Mark is another popular testing tool that ensures a wide range of tests and supports the NQC (Native Command Queuing) format. As a result, it gives a much more real-world test opposed to ATTO. The results were once again very impressive.

4K QD32 Tests (Read 119.2)

4K QD32 Tests (Read 172.3)

Conclusion

Although there are faster drives available, the Kingston SSD Now 300V 120GB aims at the entry level desktop user but it still produces some impressive results and is ideal for users who wish to make the transition to the world of SSD.

If you already own a SATA drive, I would happily recommend the Now 300V as your primary drive which would contain your operating system. This would allow faster boot-up times and increased system performance. Whereas your second drive could store documents, photos, videos, applications and games to create a workable hybrid.