Kingston SSDNow V300 (120GB & 240GB) Review
by Kristian Vättö on April 30, 2013 12:30 PM ESTRandom Read/Write Speed
The four corners of SSD performance are as follows: random read, random write, sequential read and sequential write speed. Random accesses are generally small in size, while sequential accesses tend to be larger and thus we have the four Iometer tests we use in all of our reviews.
Our first test writes 4KB in a completely random pattern over an 8GB space of the drive to simulate the sort of random access that you'd see on an OS drive (even this is more stressful than a normal desktop user would see). I perform three concurrent IOs and run the test for 3 minutes. The results reported are in average MB/s over the entire time. We use both standard pseudo randomly generated data for each write as well as fully random data to show you both the maximum and minimum performance offered by SandForce based drives in these tests. The average performance of SF drives will likely be somewhere in between the two values for each drive you see in the graphs. For an understanding of why this matters, read our original SandForce article.
Random read performance is similar to other SF-2281 SSDs; only Intel has a small advantage here.
Random write speed is also typical SandForce. The 120GB model does take a pretty big hit when using incompressible data because there's less parallelism due to fewer NAND die.
Sequential Read/Write Speed
To measure sequential performance I ran a 1 minute long 128KB sequential test over the entire span of the drive at a queue depth of 1. The results reported are in average MB/s over the entire test length.
No surprises in the sequential Iometer tests either.
AS-SSD Incompressible Sequential Performance
The AS-SSD sequential benchmark uses incompressible data for all of its transfers. The result is a pretty big reduction in sequential write speed on SandForce based controllers.
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blackmagnum - Tuesday, April 30, 2013 - link
Kingston have the brand image to succeed in this market but their product lack the unique selling point. They are just commodities like their ram sticks.Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, April 30, 2013 - link
Which is exactly the point I was trying to raise. Kingston has a decent image and their distribution system is broad but their products are not unique. They shouldn't have a problem surviving in the market but they won't be able to grab any major marketshare either.UltraTech79 - Tuesday, April 30, 2013 - link
I don't think their goal is to grab major market share. Its to maintain and secure their current market share.Diagrafeas - Tuesday, April 30, 2013 - link
Which firmware did the drives have?I bought two 120GB ones a week apart.
The first has 505 and the second 506.
The 506 is way slower...even at booting Windows.
I'll post some numbers later...
Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, April 30, 2013 - link
The 120GB I have is 505. I don't have the 240GB anymore but I'm pretty confident it's 505 too as I received it a couple of months ago so it's not exactly new.Diagrafeas - Thursday, May 2, 2013 - link
Both are on SATA 2AS SSD Benchmark Scores 505-506(Read,Write)
Seq256-175 , 158-133
4K 14-11 , 45-26
4K-64
Diagrafeas - Thursday, May 2, 2013 - link
4K-64 123-91 , 109-114Acc. Time 0.138-0.195 , 0.321-0.405
Pyrostemplar - Tuesday, April 30, 2013 - link
On the second table - Kingston SSDNow V300 Specifications - performance drops as capacity increases, something that being correct is completely new in terms of SSDs. AFAIK in every SSD the higher capacity ones have the same or greater performance than lower capacity ones (of the same model, of course). C&P mistake?Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, April 30, 2013 - link
Nope, it's not a mistake (unless Kingston's datasheet is wrong):http://www.kingston.com/datasheets/sv300s3_us.pdf
mike55 - Tuesday, April 30, 2013 - link
The images on page 3 aren't working for me.Is there any significant difference in the msachi drivers compared to intel rst? Is it worth installing the intel ones when using an SSD?