As with most component categories, the value segment of the SSD marketplace is a very competitive arena. Each of the major manufacturers has their own approach to creating value centric drives and that includes Kingston. Today we take a look at the Kingston V310 SSD from their SSDNow family. A drive which looks to offer high capacity and decent speed at a competitive price point.

The Kingston V310 SSD arrives packaged in a very compact package. Essentially a cardboard sleeve with product info that surrounds a plastic container. We get no other documentation and our bundle is a small bracket which expands the height of the drive for those with larger drive bays. Having said that, the drive will be available with a kit which includes the accessories and software required to migrate the data/operating system from our existing drive to the Kingston V310.

The Kingston V310 SSD

 

Shown above is the Kingston V310 which is part of their SSDNOW range. It has a grey matt finish and the casing is metal. Also shown above is that bracket we mentioned before which converts this from a 7mm drive to a 9.5mm drive. The top of the drive has a sticker with the product information on there and we get noting on the base, though we can see the SATA3 power and data connectors.

For the Kingston V310 the controller inside is a Phison 3108 and that, combined with the Micron 20nm NAND, is rated for 450MB/s on read and write. At least that is Kingstons specification for compressible data, they also note peak reads of around 500MB/s on incompressible data. Interestingly at this time Kingston are only releasing this drive in a 960GB capacity and will keep their LSI based V300 in retail at 60-480GB. Power use at load is 5.39w peak (write) and idle drops that figure to 0.08w.

Looking to the reliability statistics for the drive we find that it is rated for 1 million hours (MTBF) and total bytes written of 2728TB (2.65 Drive Writes Per Day). Kingston provide a 3-year warranty on this model.

Kingston SSDNow V310 Conclusion

Full performance figures can be found after the conclusion.

Although SSDs with plastic casing tend to be lighter, we always love to see metal casings on our drives and the Kingston V310 delivers on that front. The matt finish is nice and along with all the usual SSD benefits of silent operation, no moving parts etc we will of course get that solid casing. Inside we get a controller we haven’t seen before, though it is a reasonably well known brand and our cache (Kingston) along with the NAND (Micron) are of course proven components.

Looking at the pricing and therefore value on the Kingston V310 we get a bit of a mix. The drive retails a little higher than other 1TB models which are available at the moment, in the basic config. That needs fixed. The Warranty is comparable though which is good. Where Kingston excel is in their kit to migrate data. Taking the laptop edition as an example it includes a USB caddy which can then be used, after we install the Kingston V310 in our system, to turn our old hard drive into a portable model. Nice.

As is pretty much always the case on value orientated drives we do get some compromises in performance. For example if you care about synthetic tests such as CrystalDiskMark the Kingston V310 doesn’t do well, or in large file transfers of varied file types it falls behind the competition. That said, for HD video work the Kingston V310 scores well, and it is competitive in game loading times as well as Windows boot time. We also note the fact that the peak speeds are actually much higher than those advertised by Kingston.

Test System And Performance

Kingston SSDNOW V310 960GB SSD
OCZ ARC 100 240GB
Samsung 840Evo 250GB
Crucial MX100 240GB

*All drives using their latest firmware at the time of writing.

Intel Core i7-4790K
Gigabyte Z97X Gaming 5
4x4GB Corsair DDR3-2666
Samsung 850Pro SSD
Corsair AX1500i PSU

Installed on a DimasTech Easy XL Test Bench

Roccat Kone Mouse
Razer Black Widow Keyboard
Audio-Technica ATH-AG1 Headset
ASUS HD/3D 120Hz Screen

Windows 8.1
Catalyst 14.7
NVIDA Driver 340.52

Windows 8.1 Pro 64-bit
Crystal DiskMark
Blackmagic Disk Speed Test
ATTO Benchmark
Battlefield 4/Origin
PCMark 8

The test system was built from scratch, a format of the hard drives was performed (NTFS) and then Windows 8 was installed. Following the completion of the installation, the chipset and video drivers were installed. All windows updates were then installed as were the latest builds of the benchmarking tools. Finally, where appropriate, the hard drives were de-fragmented. For each test, the video drivers were set to default quality/optimizations (unless otherwise stated) and each drive was Sanitary/secure Erased between tests.

Good Benchmarking Practice

Where possible, each benchmark was performed three times and the median result for each resolution/setting is shown in the tables that will follow. All applications had their latest patches applied and all hardware features the latest BIOS/Firmware.

Atto:

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CrystalDiskMark:

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BlackMagic HD Video Benchmark:

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File Copy Tests:

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Windows Load Time:

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Battlefield 4 Load Times:
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