Kingston’s New SSDNow V300 120GB SSD comes close to HyperX performance

Conclusion

As we concluded last year, SSD technology is still one of the most rapidly improving while their price is dropping. With more and more motherboard manufacturers offering SATA 3 6Gb/s ports, the ceiling for maximum transfer speeds for disk drives has been nearly doubled from the SATA 2 3Gb/s standard. We have seen the SSD develop improved new controllers that bring faster speeds – especially beginning with the enthusiast HyperX Kingston drives and now migrating to the consumer SSDNow V300 drive.

We have watched SSD technology also get slowly cheaper over time and it is much more accessible to the regular consumer and not just for enthusiasts. Since last year’s Thailand floods which crippled HDD production, SSDs have dipped below the $1-per-gigabyte MSRP pricing regularly and sales frequently go well below this pricing once considered breakthrough. The Kingston SSDNow V300 series offers a great bang-for-buck for consumers at regular pricing and for less than $110 you can have a fast 120GB drive that comes very close to the HyperX SSDs in performance.

It is absolutely not “mandatory” to have a SSD if you use your PC only for gaming. A hardcore gamer would more likely save his money by buying a large fast mechanical drive and upgrading his graphics instead. A 1TB drive can again be had for $50 on sale. Mechanical HDDs have got quite fast for gaming and their only disadvantage compared to the SSD is waiting a second or two longer for your autosave to load; or longer for an entire level to load. However, if a gamer is impatient and wants to get right back into the game, then the SSD will definitely improve immersion and decrease frustration.

It is a matter of valuing ones time compared to what one spends on a relatively small-capacity drive; one has to choose their games and applications to put on the SSD wisely – Less than 80GB after an OS installation with a 96GB SSD or 119GB for a 128GB, or 112GB for a 120GB drive, is not a lot of space and you can only have a few modern games on your SSD at any one time.

With a low-capicity drive SSD , gamers will constantly be installing new games and uninstalling them after playing them to make room for even newer games. At 240GB to 256GB, many gamers will be satisfied with the amount of storage and it is a good compromise size for a budget conscious gamer with $200 to spend on an SSD.

Pros –

• The SSD is of a magnitude faster generally than the mechanical hard drive in almost every way. Windows startup is blazing fast and shutdown is noticeably quicker!
• Kingston’s SSDNow V300 120GB drive has improved over the previous V200 series with a new custom controller and memory that brings it up to near HyperX performance.
• SSDNow V300 is great bang for buck at $110 for a 120GB standalone drive or ten dollars more for a kit bundle
• TRIM support and garbage collection keeps your drive “like new”. The SSDNow 300 SSDs also offer advanced wear-leveling technology, S.M.A.R.T. tools and DuraClass Technology.
• Excellent bundle for notebook or desktop in a single package makes setting up your SSD a breeze and well worth the ten dollars more over the standalone drive . However, standalone offers a good option for those who already have the cloning SW and HW.
• 3-year warranty and superb Kingston support stand it out from the “SSD crowd”

Cons –

• Price per GB is still high compared to mechanical hard drives.
• Limited storage compared to HDDs
• 120GB is too small for a hardcore gamer; 240-256GB makes a difference to a gamer

The 120GB Kingston SSDNow 300 deserves the ABT Great Value award. It is a good drive for gamers who don’t mind its limited capacity, there is plenty of room for Windows, applications and perhaps five or more of your favorite games. It is also highly recommended as a time and frustration saver in starting up and shutting down Windows and for anything to do with file access, copying, or loading game levels.

Our 500GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 drives continue to performe admirably and demonstrate improvements in every way over our older 7200.10 drives. We even filled our drives to capacity as we tested over 80 games for our original 3D Vision evaluation, and they still perform as they did over a year ago when they were less than half-filled! They are awesome for storage and we will upgrade them to 1TB drives as we are already feeling capacity constrained by our 27-game benchmark suite.

It pays in every way to keep up with ABT and the best way is to follow us is on ABT forum.  Expect a OWC HDD/SSD dock and 256GB SSD evaluation, a Genius PC speaker review, a good exploration with the new Thermaltake Level 10 mouse … and much more as ABT prepares for CES with two reporters this year.

Mark Poppin

ABT Senior Editor

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