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Watch out when buying a Kingston V300 SSD

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kingston_v300My new media PC has a 120GB Kingstong V300 solid state drive (SSD). I bought it because reviews suggested that it offered excellent performance given its low price. But it seems that since those reviews were written, Kingston has started using cheaper, and much slower components in these drives.

I realize that manufacturers have to be flexible when buying parts, but benchmarks run by Gamers Nexus show huge differences in performance between earlier versions of the V300 and some later iterations. Especially with media files (which can’t be compressed during transfer). In some scenario’s, write speeds are just a third of what the original drive was capable of.

It seems like Kingston has pulled a sort of “bait and switch” here, and I’m not too happy about it. But on the plus side, it looks like my particular unit – despite being of a new revision – has the “older” faster internals. The ‘lshw’ linux command identifies the drive as:

lshw output
product KINGSTON SV300S3
version 527A
serial 50026B7744075C01

I’m not sure about this, but the product value seems to indicate that mine is a V300S version, which Gamers Nexus identified as the faster of the two incarnations. But what’s disturbing about this is that – with both versions out there – it’s very hard to know which version you’re buying. The “527″ (or 505, 506 or 521) is probably readable through the blister packaging (it’s on the front of the drive), but that won’t help you when buying online.

All in all, I think this reflects very poorly on Kingston. I hope they come clean and offer refunds and all that, but I think the bigger problem is that this kind of thing is probably more common than we think.

EDIT: Found this document (PDF) on Kingston’s website today that offers an explanation, and even benchmarks. Looks like they’re admitting there are considerable performance differences, but not that that is a problem. Hmmm…


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