Customer Reviews

Kingston Technology 60GB Solid State Drive V300 2.5-inch SATA 3 with Adapter

5 star:		(70)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Not many reviews around for this item, so I thought I'd write one. Purchased during the black friday sale, this was delivered within four days (using the free delivery option!)

For background info, Kingston make three main series of SSD drives - V200, V+200 and HyperX. The first two are labelled as Consumer drives, and HyperX is for Enthusiasts. Confusingly, the V+200 also makes an appearance in the business drive category. The V+200 has upgraded speeds compared to V200, so you should always look for the V+ designation. My reason for choosing this was the special offer price and also the fact that Kingston use Intel/Micron chips in their drives.

The drive was marked SVP200S37A/240Gand is 7mm high. The case is built from metal and feels very sturdy, weight is just over 100g. Also in the pack was a rectangular plastic pad which can be attached to the drive to allow its height to be increased to 9.5mm high. Note that if you pay a few more pounds for the "kit" version of this product, you'll get an external USB drive enclosure, cables and software to allow cloning of an existing system. I didn't need that since I was planning on a fresh install (many SSD reviews suggest that doing a fresh install will ensure that Windows is set up correctly for SSDs, whereas cloning an old setup might not).

On my Thinkpad T400, Windows 7 installed on the SSD in under 30 mins. Boot times are under 20 seconds compared to just over 2 minutes previously - this is on a system with only the OS and MS Office loaded. The weight of the SSD is slightly lower than the drive it replaced and power consumption is lower as well, so there are other benefits from the upgrade. Overall I'd say the V200+ is a respectable performer and offers great value for the average user if you get it on sale. At full price there are probably better competing drives around (like the Kingston HyperX, Samsung 830, Corsair GT). This drive comes with a 3 year warranty from Kingston who is of course a well known and established company. For more info visit [...]

I am a PC builder and enthusiast and have over 10 years experience of building, upgrading and maintaining computer systems. Put simply; if you have a reasonable computer (with a relatively modern processor and enough RAM for windows to run comfortably) a solid state drive, like this one offers the most noticeable upgrade to performance for your money.

Sure, this Kingston V300 model isn't the absolute fastest out there. But, compared to the mechanical drives that the majority of computers still use, this is measurably faster in all areas and comes at a very reasonable price. In real world use, you will notice a massive difference. It does this by using solid state memory in the device (rather like a large memory card) rather than the magnetic, mechanical moving parts of older drives.

Installing the drive couldn't be easier if you're reasonably proficient at plugging and unplugging things inside your computer. It takes standard SATA data and power connections, and is backwards compatible with SATA 2 if your motherboard isn't SATA 3 enabled. In the real world, the difference between 2 and 3 is negligible in my experience anyway.

Once you've installed Windows (or whatever OS you use) on to this drive (presuming you intend to use it as your system drive - definitely the thing to do) you'll find that from pressing the power button on your PC to it being in a usable desktop state will be around 25 to 30 seconds at the very, very most. Any programmes you install on it, and Windows itself, open near-instantly with no delay and it really will turn a PC into something which is a pleasure to use, not something you have to wait to catch up.

The drive scores the maximum score on the Windows Performance Index; 7.9.

Much about PC components, especially when you get into enthusiast grade items, is bluster and macho-marketing. This solid state drive though, will be a noticeable and pleasurable improvement for anyone with a computer with an "old" mechanical, traditional hard drive. Once you use a solid state drive, you'll never, ever want to use anything else. And that is definitely not marketing rubbish.

Well, it's just arrived today. This will be a rolling review, updated as I use it.

So far, a good sturdy feeling drive, lots of reviews on the web have been very complementary about it (i spent ages researching it). It is marketed as a budget drive. But what's budget about it?

Well from the looks of the reviews it's not able to handle as high a workload as many of the other more expensive drives. BUT as one review pointed out, the amount of work they were using to test it was pretty high (64 queue depth)and way out of the way of people who use their system to a 'normal' degree.

So it looks like if you are doing ALOT of things all at once and all wanting disk access, other drives may be better. BUT if you are doing all that you're likely to look for the higher performing drives anyway.

On the positive side the reviews show it holds it's own VERY well in other areas compared again to the more expensive drives.

**UPDATE 1 MONTH ON***

It's great, boots INCREDIBLY quickly and windows now flies around.
If like me you are spending ages looking at all the different options and require a good fast drive and you're not going to be overloading it with work then save yourself some time and just get this one.

10 out of 10. Worked straight out of the box. Make sure if you want it to use it as a 'bootable' drive you order the "Kit" and not just the drive on its own. Pay the extra �5 and have the kit, as the "kit" has the cloning software included, which is worth its weight in gold. Took me just an hour to install the drive, copy my hard drive onto it and away it went. 20 seconds to load Windows 7 from cold, used to take 2 minutes.

Windows loading 2-3x faster, virus scanner less of a hog on login, photos load instantly. Nice little upgrade that's becoming more affordable, put my system partition on it. Things that are more disk intensive will benefit more than basic applications, so cost is more the issue than performance gain, but I consider this SSD to be a good option for the price (~�60). Didn't bother with the full kit as those items can be purchased cheaply as needed, cloning software is freely available.
Would have given 5* but for a couple of gripes with the company, more than the product. Firstly, "120 GB" is actually 120 billion bytes or roughly 111.7 GB, nowhere does it make it clear that they are choosing to use SI measurements instead of established counting, at the least they should state honestly both size measurements. Luckily my partition still fitted despite my perceived loss of 8.3 GB. Secondly, I find the packaging's boast of "10x faster" to be outlandish. My real-world experience is that I'll never get anything like that, even if I do get to use SATA3, because it's not like my existing HDD was an old clanger. For reference, I've gone from ~130 MB/s to ~280 MB/s read/write performance. Maybe the manufacturer would care to publish the exact setup they used to obtain a benchmark score of 10x improvement, and under what conditions.

I purchased two Samsung 840 series SSD's back in March 2013 (Samsung were offering cash back with every purchase). One SSD was 250GB (for my games) and the other was 500GB for my OS. They both had a read speed of 540MB/s and write speed of 330MB/s. In just under 7 months, the 250GB Samsung SSD for my favourite games had failed. I was very disappointed and RMA'd it back to Ebuyer and I was given a full refund. I used the money to purchase this 240GB Kingston SV300 SSD. At the time of purchase it cost me �117 (I also purchased the new and improved Samsung 840 EVO SSD @ 250GB which cost �130 from Amazon and has a stated read rate of 540MB/s and write rate of 520MB/s). The Kingston arrived a few days earlier. Installation was straight forward. I now have 3 SSD's running in my pc. The original 500GB Samsung SSD is working fine.

I have had the 2 new SSD's up and running for a fortnight. The Kingston website states that the SV300 has a read/write rate of 450MB/s. I have to say, my Kingston SSD did not come with any software which was a bit of a disappointment. I used the Samsung magician software that came with my Samsung 840 & EVO SSD to run a performance test of all 3 SSD's. The results are as follows -

Kingston SV300 @ 240GB = Read rate of 553MB/s (read IOPS of 56291). Write rate of 494MB/s (write IOPS 66122).
Samsung 840 Evo @ 250GB = Read rate of 534MB/s (read IOPS of 66219). Write rate of 497MB/s (write IOPS 61850).
Samsung 840 series @ 500GB = Read rate of 500MB/s (read IOPS of 64721). Write rate of 309MB/s (write IOPS 41684).

The performance test was conducted twice on Sunday 27th October 2013.

Bearing in mind the stated performance on the Kingston website (450MB/s read and write speeds), I am very happy with the SV300. It has performed beyond my expectations. It clearly beat both Samsung SSD's in read rate and it was virtually identical to the EVO in write speed. It also pummelled the 500GB 840 series in write rate. Despite having slower read IOPS than both Samsung models, it still performed far better overall. It was also much better value for money (at �117) and like the Samsung models, the Kingston SV300 also has a 3 years manufacturer warranty.

I am confident that the Kingston SSD will live up to it's life expectancy and will most probably exceed it. I have always used Kingston RAM in the past. In my experience, it was far more reliable and far better value for money than other makes of RAM I have used (Corsair particularly!). In the same spirit, I am certain that this Kingston SSD will be just as robust as the Kingston RAM.

In fact, the only complaint I have (and hence 4* and not 5*) is that the Kingston SSD did not come with migration or indeed, any type of software. If it had, then it would have been an absolutely unbeatable winner. I am also sad to see that the price has also gone up from �117 to now �120 (for stand alone SSD) and also to �138 for the full retail kit (mounting brackets and data migration software). As a consumer, I am looking for an item that will be not only reliable but also fantastic value at a very competitive price.

Despite the niggles, as far as the hardware is concerned, I am very impressed and I whole heartedly recommend either this SV300 series or the HyperX edition SSD which is built for the performance enthusiast and avid gamer (Kingston data sheet states read = 555MB/s and write 510 MB/s, but bearing in mind my experience with the SV300, I think the HyperX will be faster still).

Last point to mention is the 1* review given by another customer. He stated this unit has very slow read/write speeds, since it transpired his unit was assembled in China. I was worried after reading his review. However, I checked the packaging for my unit and it clearly stated 'assembled in Taiwan'. So I am happy, particularly bearing in mind the results of my performance test.

Bought this as a boot drive for a budget build i'm doing and good god its fast. No problems in installation or installing windows, comes with a nice bracket to make the drive thicker for desktop SSD brackets and can be removed to fit slimline netbooks.

Overall a great product and a great purchase, I will happily advise any new or experienced builder to use one of these as a budget boot drive :)

As i was upgrading my old Compaq Presario V6000 to its full RAM capacity I came across this item. I did a bit of a research and realized that if I wanted to buy a new PC with an SSD in it I would have needed to cough up around �800. And that would probably be a 120Gb thing. So I gave this boy a try and what a change it made indeed to the old laptop! The installation was easy, as the kit contains everything you need and even more than you need if you own a laptop (it has some extra parts for a desktop installation). Image software was quite straightforward too, although I used Custom mode to replicate the Compaq system partition to the same size and get the max out of the 'data' partition.
The boot speed shrinked by half. It went from 59 sec. to 27 sec. The PC is now virtually silent for the most part, save for an occasional fan interventions. Once it's booted everything loads up in an instant, I honestly did not expect the effect to be so dramatic. Windows Vista is now flying like a rocket, when it was nearly dead before the upgrade.
There is only one little bit which makes it a "four-and-a-half star" review - the PC 'hangs' occasionally for some considerable intervals, maybe 20 sec or so. It apparently does something with the SSD as the disk LED stays on. After a while it springs back to life though, I remember I only had to do a cold reboot once, that's when I initially was impatient and thought it got frozen for good. However I must say those 'freezes' are nothing compared to the old HDD style 'slowness' which rendered the Vista almost unusable before this upgrade.
I thoroughly recommend this product as it saved me a lot of money and hassle. Now I don't need to buy a new PC.

I have installed this in my laptop, and as I was hoping it has provided a considerable speed improvement. Other than speed, adding an SSD drive will also make your laptop last longer on a single charge and will make your laptop run cooler and quieter, so all in all it's one of the most beneficial upgrades you can make, and this particular drive has certainly proved to be a good upgrade.

The actual hardware installation was relatively simple, just a question of taking out the old hard drive and replacing with this one; note you will need a mounting kit to install this in a desktop PC.

All SSD drives are not created equally, this has a read and write speed of 450MB/s, which is relatively quick - some faster drives do exist but they may have slower read speeds, for example the Samsung 840 Series 120GB 2.5 inch SATA Solid State Drive which I have on another machine has a 530MB/s read speed, but only 130MB/s write) It really does depend on what you want to do with the drive.

The drive is a slim 2.5" model, and is only 7mm high. It contains also a 2mm piece of self adhesive plastic that you can stick to it to make it a standard 9mm height so that it will fit everywhere a standard 2.5" drive.

Overall I would wholly recommend this solidstate drive which is better all round than the samsung I had already purchased, since installation it has been trouble free and reliable - it's a good buy.

The Kingston 120GB SSD Now is Kingston's latest offering in the cheaper end of the SSD (Solid State Drive) market. These drives use a technology akin to that used in flash drives , and seen in the likes of tablets and smart phones, to provide a slim, cool and fast performing storage device for your system. This is not the fastest performing SSD drive around but has a reputation for being a solid and stable performer at a very reasonable price.

I've been using an SSD in my PC since last year and have been very pleased the performance and the stability once I realised you must be sure to optimise and trim your drives regularly so that the SSD's own garbage collection routines can run properly (otherwise you can get freezing problems as the drive tries to access unavailable areas of the drive).

The biggest bottleneck to performance on my system had been the HDD, and it will be for a lot of people. The temptation can be to buy a new motherboard or CPU but it's often the case that these may well handle everything you need perfectly fast but are being hamstrung by a slow old mechanical drive. This is an upgrade that can affordably transform a system and lead to it running cooler in the process.

I therefore jumped at the chance to get one of these to install for my sons PC. He is keen on PC gaming and has a good rig but it was held back my slowing boot times from it's Hard disk drive.

It's worth noting that these drives are 2.5" laptop sized. If you want to install them in a desktop then an adaptor like this allows you to attach them Akasa AK-HDA-03 2.5-3.5 inch SSD/HDD Adapter

Installation was easy. I plugged the drive into the adapter bay and easily slotted this into the tower. I then plugged this into a spare sata port (choose a sata 3 port if you have one for the 6 gb/sec rather than 3 gb speeds). Following that I booted up and went into the BIOS set-up to tell the system this was the primary drive and to set my boot order. Following that I put Windows into the DVD drive, started the boot process and carried out the installation. A fresh install is preferred rather than copying an image from and old HDD as Windows 7 onwards will optimise itself for an SSD and you always get a better and fresh performance when performing a clean build.

I installed Windows 8 and the main programs onto the SSD alongside it. Everything else is running on his main hard drisk drive (media, documents and data, steam library and the likes) so he gets very good performance but doesn't shorten the life of the SSD by writing to it more than necessary. That way the majority of dynamic and frequently changing high volume stuff can sit on the HDD whilst the SSD handles the task of running the OS itself. This should ensure a balance of performance and system life and the system still runs very quickly. This also means this drive is still two thirds empty , thus ensuring plenty of spare capacity and hopefully life.

As expected this has given the system a big boost for a very fairly priced drive, knocking boot times down from minutes to seconds. Overall a nice bit of kit and very worth considering to boost system performance.

Note: the product description suggests this comes with a 3.5 " adapter and sata cables plus cloning software. This is incorrect. This version is just the drive without any of the extras.