I have a Samsung 128GB 830 SSD in my main desktop PC, and I fitted an Intel 330 Series 120GB SSD in my wife's laptop, so I have experience with SSDs from other manufacturers. These drives come from huge companies with a lot of industry experience with this technology, so I was interested to test a newer SSD from a different manufacturer to see how it compares. Kingston have a lot of experience and a good reputation as a manufacturer of memory chips, which is a very closely related field, so they should be ideally placed to build SSDs to a high standard.Physically all SSDs are very similar, and the KC300 is no exception. It is only 7mm deep, making it suitable for some extremely compact Ultrabook laptops. As a nice touch, Kingston include a free 7mm to 9.5mm adapter (which is very easily stuck on to the drive) if your laptop's drive bay only accepts slightly thicker 9.5mm drives. If you're using this SSD in a desktop PC with a 3.5" drive bay, you will need to use a standard 2.5" to 3.5" drive adapter (which should be included for free with the retail version of the KC300). As you would expect from an SSD, this drive runs silently, does not generate much heat, requires less power to run (and therefore saves battery life in a laptop) and delivers fantastic performance.I fitted my KC300 in a 2 year old Toshiba Satellite laptop (Intel Core i5 CPU, 6GB RAM), replacing a standard 640GB 2.5" laptop drive. Kingston claim this drive will perform reads at up to 525MB/sec, and writes at up to 500MB/sec. Now these are theoretical maximums, so we can't expect to see this performance in the real world. I used the free 'AS SSD Benchmark' tool to measure the real performance in my laptop. I got read speeds of 440MB/sec, and write speeds of 235MB/sec, which I was pretty pleased with to be honest.So far so good, but the reason I cannot award the full 5 stars for this drive is the poor quality of supporting software from Kingston. Intel provide their 'SSD Toolbox' software, and Samsung provide their 'SSD Magician' software. Both of these tools are well designed and fully featured. They allow you to benchmark your SSD performance, optimise the drive (using TRIM operations to clean up free space), check it for errors/issues, and update the firmware. They can run in the background, or on a schedule of your choice, and are well-rounded stable tools. The equivalent from Kingston is nowhere near as polished. The only available download is described as a 'Firmware Update', but it actually includes all available tools (which is not many). The download is a ZIP file which must be extracted before use (there is no installer). The executable must be run manually as an administrator, otherwise it doesn't start. In addition to the firmware update tool, it offers a "Secure Erase" option and the ability to check the drive's "SMART Data" for errors. There is no optimisation or benchmark facilities, nor will it check online for newer firmware than the version it comes with. You cannot schedule or run this tool in the background. It really is very limited.Your hard drive is the most important part of your computer, where all your data lives, and it is generally the most likely component to fail. I want a drive that not only performs well, but has an excellent reputation for reliability, and comes from a manufacturer with good experience and decent support options. On that basis, I would always choose a Samsung or Intel SSD over a Kingston one. There is nothing inherently wrong with this drive other than the disappointing software, but personally I would recommend that you consider a Samsung 840 Series 120GB SSD instead (which is currently slightly cheaper!). If you want more performance, consider the Samsung 840 Series Pro 128GB SSD model.