INTRODUCTION

   The continuous price free fall in the SSD market (due to increased competition and smaller manufacturing processes) has allowed manufacturers not only to forge new alliances and improve existing ones with NAND Flash controller manufacturers but also to finally release their very own high capacity models. Of course the price/capacity ratio crown is still held by regular HDDs and that's not going to change any time soon but nowadays you can purchase an 1TB SSD for less than $0.8 per GB which is quite a leap compared to just 4 years ago when you had to spend over three times as much. The best thing about that however is that PCIex SSD prices have also taken a dive so i expect such models to become quite popular even amongst regular consumers and gamers in the near future. Now as some of you know three days ago Kingston announced the availability of the latest addition in their SSDNow line the high capacity V310 960GB SSD model which features the 3108 NAND flash controller by PHISON and as expected we are amongst the very first people to actually take it for a ride.

   Kingston Technology Company, Inc. is the world’s largest independent manufacturer of memory products. Kingston designs, manufactures and distributes memory products for desktops, laptops, servers, printers, and Flash memory products for PDAs, mobile phones, digital cameras, and MP3 players. Through its global network of subsidiaries and affiliates, Kingston has manufacturing facilities in California, Taiwan, China and sales representatives in the United States, Canada, Europe, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, Australia, New Zealand, India, Taiwan, China, and Latin America.

   PHISON may not be as popular as Samsung, LSI/Sandforce and Marvell but we've seen their controllers being used in several SSD models in the past and although not at the top of the charts still they do offer a very good price/performance ratio (enough for manufacturers to choose their solutions over others). So the brand new SSDNow V310 960GB SSD wears the PHISON PS3108-S8-I SATA-to-Flash 8-channel micro-controller and Micron's 128Gbit 20nm MLC NAND Flash. The PS3108-S8 NAND Flash controller has an MTBF of 1 million hours and packs the usual features we've seen in the past with other SSD models like the S55/V55 including AES encryption, NCQ/TRIM/RAID, S.M.A.R.T, Static and Dynamic Wear Leveling, Bad Block Management and DEVSLP (Device Sleep). Now this is the first time we've decided to test an 960GB drive (well not much of a choice since the V310 is only available at that capacity) because we feel that most consumers can't afford one so we're quite eager to see how it performs.