Kingston SSDNow V300 120GB SSD Review

Futuremark’s PCMark benchmarking suite should need no introduction; it has been a staple of PC benchmarks for the better half of a decade. It includes over 25 individual workloads designed to measure all aspects of system performance and gives individual scores in each test as well as an overall system performance score for easy system comparisons.

PCMark 7 offers a more accurate measure of performance as compared to its predecessor, PCMark Vantage. The storage scoring metrics especially were significantly re-tuned and optimized with SSDs in mind to give a more balanced disk subsystem score.

Despite the capacity difference, which will put the V300 at a disadvantage in our benchmarks, the 120GB V300 has no problem hanging with and in many cases offering performance equivalent to the other SSDs in our graphs. This is even more noteworthy given most of these SSDs are still considered to be at or near the top in SSD performance and that the V300 is being positioned as a budget SSD.

In several subtests the V300 is able to surpass the m4 and even the Vector in a few cases, but behind the other SSDs in the Importing Pictures test. Given that Jpegs are already naturally compressed this would be one of the few subtests that would highlight the drawbacks with relying on compressible data for top performance. All-in-all the overall PCMark storage system score places the V300 about on par with the m4.