Kingston SSDNow V300 (120GB & 240GB) Review
by Kristian Vättö on April 30, 2013 12:30 PM ESTTRIM Performance
SandForce has always had trouble with TRIM. SandForce's approach of compressing data on the fly definitely complicates things and I believe it's at least partially the reason why TRIM behaves the way it does in SandForce based SSDs. Even though TRIM doesn't work perfectly in any SandForce SSD, there are differences between drives and some do better than others.
As usual, I took a 240GB V300, secure erased it, filled it with incompressible sequential data and then tortured the drive with incompressible 4KB random writes (QD=32, LBA space 100%) for 60 minutes. I then ran AS-SSD after the torture to get dirty-state performance. Finally I TRIM'ed the drive and reran AS-SSD.
Kingston SSDNow V300 Resiliency - AS-SSD | |||
Clean | After Torture | After TRIM | |
Kingston SSDNow V300 240GB | 278.2MB/s | 204.7MB/s | 257.6MB/s |
And the issue still persists. For the most part, this isn't a big issue because the majority of users won't store just incompressible data in their SSD (e.g. Windows is very compressible) but if you know you'll be storing lots of incompressible data (H.264 videos, MP3s or encrypted data), then going with something non-SandForce is a better option.
Power Consumption
In terms of power consumption, the V300 does pretty well. It doesn't break any records but for example Corsair's Force GS draws more power in all of our tests. The utilization of smaller process node NAND (19nm versus 24nm) does have some impact but I wouldn't be surprised if Kingston's customization also has something to do with the lower power draw.
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eddieobscurant - Saturday, May 4, 2013 - link
I think kingston is using very low quality nand for the v300 series. The 128gb model only has 64tb tbw before reaches endurance limits and the 256gb only 128tb according to their official pdf datasheet. http://www.kingston.com/datasheets/sv300s3_us.pdf That would mean around 500 p/e. Samsung tlc drives have at least 1000 p/e. Could you please ask kingston about this?Kristian Vättö - Saturday, May 4, 2013 - link
That's most likely with a random write centric workload. E.g. Crucial M500 is rated at 72TB and Samsung SSD 840 Pro at 73TB, but the workloads for the figure mainly consist of small random writes. Let me send Kingston an email and ask about the exact workload so we'll know better.eddieobscurant - Saturday, May 4, 2013 - link
thanks, could you also ask if the warranty is voided if someone exceeds this limit?Diagrafeas - Monday, May 6, 2013 - link
Could you ask the about the firware updates, because 506 isn't working as it should.Could give the option to flash 505 or a fixed 507...
Kristian Vättö - Monday, May 6, 2013 - link
I'll ask about that too. Already sent an email about the endurance so I'll ask about the firmwares when Kingston replies.eddieobscurant - Tuesday, May 14, 2013 - link
Did you get any reply from kingston?Kristian Vättö - Friday, May 17, 2013 - link
I got a reply that they'll check and get back to me, but they haven't done that yet. You may want to drop me an email (kristian@anandtech.com) so I can reach to you directly when I receive an answer.Davidjan - Saturday, May 4, 2013 - link
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Davidjan - Saturday, May 4, 2013 - link
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andyfei/mini-m...spooky2th - Sunday, May 5, 2013 - link
I've had a Kingston 240GB HyperX 3K since Aug. 2012. And it is fantastic as far as I'm concerned. Even with Vista Home Premium, 64Bit. No trim support in Vista so I have to manually optimize the SSD every week or 2. Optimizing the SSD only takes a minute. Other than that, I am a very happy camper.