INTRODUCTION

   During this year's CES several manufacturers found the opportunity not only to promote already existing SSD models but also to introduce brand new ones most of which followed the standard SATA III connection while surprisingly only a few were PCIex based. The only reason i say that this surprised me is because personally i feel that the only serious performance jump I’ve seen between SSD models ever since the 2nd generation of controllers made its appearance roughly 2 years ago was when i started using PCIex based SSDs (just check the RevoDrive3 in our charts and keep in mind that this is an entry level PCIex based SSD). PCIex based SSDs however are still quite expensive and so in a way i can understand that manufacturers want to target the masses and not just enthusiasts and professionals. So with this in mind we decided to continue our SSD review spree by taking a thorough look on the latest mainstream (budget as some call it) SSD model introduced by Kingston a few weeks back, the SSDNow V300.

 Kingston Technology Company, Inc. is the world’s independent memory leader. Founded in 1987 with a single product offering, Kingston® now offers more than 2,000 memory products that support nearly every device that uses memory, from computers, servers and printers to MP3 players, digital cameras and mobile phones. In 2009, the company's sales reached $4.1 billion. With global headquarters in Fountain Valley, California, Kingston employs more than 4,000 people worldwide. Regarded as one of the “Best Companies to Work for in America” by Fortune magazine, Kingston’s tenets of respect, loyalty, flexibility and integrity create an exemplary corporate culture. Kingston believes that investing in its people is essential, and each employee is a vital part of Kingston’s success. Kingston serves an international network of distributors, resellers, retailers and OEM customers on six continents. The company also provides contract manufacturing and supply chain management services for semiconductor manufacturers and system OEMs.

     At the center of the brand new SSDNow V300 series of SSDs we see the SandForce SF-2281 controller (pretty much the most popular controller of 2012) which in turn is paired with the brand new 19nm NAND flash memory by Toshiba. Now since we've tested and used far too many SSD models using the SandForce SF-2281 controller it's a safe guess that the SSDNow V300 should have similar performance levels. We have no way of knowing however just how good the brand new 19nm NAND flash memory modules by Toshiba are and that is pretty much the wildcard in this test. Of course just like every SF-2281 based SSD out there the SSDNow V300 features RAISE (error correction, RAID like protection and recovery) DuraClass (advanced wear leveling and monitoring algorithms) and DuraWrite technology (up to 20x or more the flash endurance compared to other controllers) along with TRIM and intelligent garbage collection. On paper everything looks great, however time to see just how all these translate in performance.