Kingston Launches V200 Series Entry-Level SSDs

Kingston has recently announced the replacement of the SSDNow V100 Series SSDs, aptly named SSDNow V200. Kingston makes a point to state the V200 promises to deliver “nearly twice the performance, up to 20% lower price than the V100”, and as such the V200 comes readily equipped with a SATA 6Gb/s interface.

As with past Kingston SSDNow models, the V200 family will include 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB capacities and be sold individually and in upgrade kits. The desktop kit will include cloning software, a step-by-step installation video, data & power cables, and the 3.5″ mounting bracket. The notebook kit will instead switch the bracket for a 2.5” external enclosure to make for easy OS cloning or data transfers prior to the final installation in a laptop.

While the V200 will offer nearly twice the performance of the V100 Series, things become less rosy however when looking at the actual specifications. The 128GB V200 is listed to feature 300MB/s reads and 190MB/s writes, hardly necessitating the SATA 6Gb/s interface. As for random IOPS the 128GB V200 will offer 36,000 read and 2,500 write IOPS respectively. Obviously the V200 is a budget SSD, so before rushing to judgment, what does the pricing look like?

Current prices for the 128GB V100 Series on Newegg place the drive around $195, so the best case we can expect is that the 20% lower figure applies to street prices, not retail MSRP. Even so this would peg the prices somewhere in the ballpark of $160. This does place the V200 in a competitive position to the mainstream Intel 320 Series SSDs. But SF-2281 powered SSDs can be found around $160 already, and even less if mail-in rebates are considered. Given any budget SF-2281 SSD will offer double the performance in most categories, the V200 is shaping up to be a hard sell indeed.