Kingston Releases SSDNow V200 Series

Kingston has released a new SSD lineup named as SSDNow V200. This series comes in 2.5" form factor and is the successor of V100 series, which was released a year ago. Below is a table of the specifications.

V200 brings support for SATA 6Gb/s, which is always a welcome addition, although the speeds are more SATA 3Gb/s level. The controller is manufactured by JMicron and it's most likely JMF66x as that is JMicron's first and only SATA 6Gb/s controller if their roadmap is to believe. It was first shown in Computex 2011 and back then, JMicron claimed up to 500MB/s read and 400MB/s write. As the table above shows, something does not add up. V200 is good for only up to 300MB/s, 200MB/s short of the predicted read performance. Either Kingston's firmware is very bad, or JMicron had far too big expectations in June. JMicron's SSD controllers have usually been aimed at low-end SSDs, and JMF66x seems to be no exception. Of course, the other possibility is that the controller is not JMF66x, but a different SATA 6Gb/s controller which is not shown in the roadmap.

Kingston markets V200 as a budget SSD, but I beg to differ. SF-2281 based 60GB OCZ Agility 3 goes for $86 in NewEgg, and 120GB and 240GB versions of this SSD go for $155 and $340 respectively. On average, Agility 3 is 30% cheaper and speed wise it's almost twice as fast. It's possible that resellers will sell V200 at lower prices but a 30% drop is unlikely (the prices in the table are from Kingston's online store).

If you are insterested in cheaper SSDs, stay tuned for our analysis on TLC NAND flash, which will (hopefully) be out soon.