The 120GB Kingston SSDNow V300 Series SV300S3D7 internal solid-state drive (SSD) is priced to appeal to ordinary consumers but with performance that sat at the top of the enthusiasts market not so long ago.

Great price/performance ratio; Priced well below $1 per GB

Older SF-2181 loses speed in random read/writes; or when working with uncompressed data

Solid State Drives are becoming the more cost effective upgrade to the traditional home computer.

– Great performance; – Accessories bundle; – Price

– Would have liked to see a 5 year warranty

As the world's largest independent manufacturer of memory products, Kingston Technology doesn't need much of an introduction. The company got its start in 1987, when the computer industry was suffering from a severe shortage of surface-mount memory chips.

Available in 60GB; 120GB and 240GB capacities; SandForce SF-2281 processor; Toggle Mode NAND flash; Excellent sequential read and write speeds; SATA 6Gb/s interface; Supports SMART; TRIM and Garbage Collection; Available as stand-alone drive or as part of an upgrade kit; Well constructed design,...

Not as fast when writing incompressible data

The Kingston SSDNow V300 120GB solid state drive covered in this review has a respectable capacity of 120GB. Although marketed as a "notebook bundle kit," this SSD will perform just the same in either a desktop or notebook environment.

With compressible data this drive exceeded its rated read and write transfer speeds by 50MB/s; Win7 loading time of 23 seconds with an overclocked i5 2500k; Fair pricing; at less than $1/GB; Included Acronis disk cloning software is very effective and simple to use

Poor; but expected sequential read/write performance with incompressible data

In this review PCSTATS will be testing the 240GB Kingston SSDnow V300 SSD - a 6Gb/s SATA III drive rated by the manufacturer for sequential read speeds up to 450MB/s and write speeds up to 450MB/s.

Frankly speaking, we are rather wary of SandForce-based SSDs. Besides their past firmware flaws which took a lot of time to be corrected, we don't like their susceptibility to performance degradation due to imperfect TRIM implementation whereas their on-the-fly data compression is only good from the...

The newest of the series will be the V300 which is now offered in 60GB, 120GB and the largest 240GB sizes. The heart of the drive is a LSI SandForce controller and new 19mm NAND modules all optimized for Kingston. But is it enough to top one of our favorites? We will soon see.

Upgrading to a Solid State Disk or SSD is one of the best performance enhancing upgrades that one can do to their PC. SSDs allow almost instant access to the stored data thanks to extremely low access times as well as high transfer rates.

The drive is available at RM 299 but it doesn't come with an installation kit, and yet it costs more than the Intel 330 series of the same size that comes with an installation kit (RM 269)! I didn't buy an Intel 330 series because I already have one, so I thought to give Kingston's drive a spin.

The Kingston V300 128GB is an odd drive in a category where we want to find consistency. The V300 128GB has some good points, some bad points and some points we really can't explain. The drive is different from most LSI SandForce SF-2281 products we've tested.