Kingston SSDNow V Series

Although SSD drives offer tremendous performance these storage devices carry a price premium compared to standard, spindle-based hard drives. With its SSDNow V Series line Kingston is targeting cash-strapped buyers interested in getting on the SSD bandwagon.

Being a desktop upgrade kit our test sample SSDNow V Series ships with rails that enable you to mount the drive in a 3.5-inch bay. Kingston also supplies a molex to SATA power converter and a Serial ATA cable, so you don't have to buy anything extra before you mount this SSD in your machine.

Kingston also sells this drive as standalone or with a notebook mounting kit, so depending on what you plan to upgrade you can buy accordingly. At a cost of US $116 our 40GB test sample SSD costs $2.9 per gigabyte and this is quite good value given that this is a retail kit with all the necessary hardware to upgrade your desktop PC.

On the performance front the V Series performs reasonably well; our HDTach 3 benchmark recorded a read speed of 155MB/sec and a burst speed of 170MB/sec.In our real world benchmarks the drive took 20- and 9-seconds to complete our Company of Heroes and F.E.A.R load level tests. Comparing these results to the Patriot Torqx and Intel's second generation X25-M drives the Kingston is slightly slower but wins in terms of overall value-for-money.