Kingston SSDNow V300 120GB
SandForce tech soldiers on...
THERE WAS A TIME when the SandForce SF-2281 SSD controller stalked the land like some kind of murderous zombie immortal, annihilating all in its path. As an SSD maker, if your drives didn’t have a SandForce controller, they’d soon be dead in the market. Resistance was futile.
As it happens, SandForce’s controllers leapt to prominence about the same time as the so-called “white walkers” from a certain fantasy TV series entered the public imagination. Coincidence? Whatever, that was then—now, we’d turn this already strained metaphor around and ask whether winter is coming for the Kingston SSDNow V300’s competition. Or whether this Sand Force-powered SSD is just a dumb zombie drive that needs to be put down. Over to Samwell Tarly for the technical analysis.
On paper, the V300 seems to have something of a pulse. This drive rocks in at a modest 120GB, but at least sports Toshiba 19nm MLC NAND memory, rather than the lowest of the low TLC memory, with all the reliability concerns that can suggest. Peak claimed speeds of 450MB/s in both directions, and 55,000 write IOPS, look OK, too.
Initially, the benchmarks don’t look too shabby, either. Fire up something like the ATTO Disk benchmark, and you get numbers north of 500MB/s for both reads and writes. Nice. The 4K random access numbers are tolerable, too.
Unfortunately, things don’t look too clever thereafter. Traditionally, the SandForce controller’s performance has looked a lot less clever when handling incompressible data, and so it is with the V300. AS SSD and CrystalMark reveal sequential speeds of around 130MB/s—mediocre.
Worst of all is the real-world data copying test. We had a feeling this was going to be ugly when setting the drive up. In the Windows dialog box, it was obvious that the V300’s initially speedy performance drops off rapidly. The upshot is a result of 6 minutes and 47 seconds on the file copy test—last among these 10 SSDs. It’s also nearly three times slower than what we’d class as a decent SATA drive. Ouch. Even Melisandre couldn’t make this drive look lively. Someone grab the dragon glass and do the honors.