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.

Bought this for a 2012 macbook pro and this breathed new life into the machine. Like night and day. Has been working for a couple of years now.

half the speed of plextor m6s... & does get warm & eats double power compared to the m6s

Easy To Install; Quiet

Runs Hot; Slow

It sometimes costs less than better performing drives.

When first released and reviewed by the industry Kingston used synchronous NAND when building the V300's; In later revisions they transitioned to using cheaper asynchronous NAND which has resulted in severely degraded performance and did nothing to make customers aware of the change

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

We have seem over the past year or so that the SSDNow series is aimed that the budget consumer. The one that wants the core essentials of a solid state drive without having to pay out the nose for it, this series from Kingston has been just that.

Lastly, with the initial create task in Compile Bench the performance out of the KINGSTON SV300S3 120GB on Ubuntu with the Linux 3.13 kernel was on par with the OCZ Vertex 3 SSD. At the end of the day there isn't anything special about the Kingston SSDNow V300's performance.

To test the Kingston SSDNow V300 240G Upgrade Kit I used ATTO disk benchmark and CrystalDisk Mark. These two programs give a pretty good indication of level of performance one can expect. Testing Methodology: Here are the results and the Kingston SSDNow V300 240G Upgrade Kit doesn't fail to impress.

As with any value-oriented product, the largest issue comes down to price. At the time of this writing, the bare 120GB drive can be had for $101 from a of couple retailers, with the various kits adding another $10-15 onto that.