The time of affordable 1TB SSDs is upon us. Well, affordable-ish…
The SSD conundrum has always been whether to sacrifice size for speed. Do you spend the same cash on a smaller, faster SSD or a capacious, slower hard drive? Recently, reasonably affordable 1TB SSDs have meant this doesn’t have to be such a hard choice, although ‘reasonably affordable’ still nudges £400 in this case.
Still, if 960GB of flash storage is what you want, then Kingston will provide it. The SSDNow v310 ‘range’ isn’t so much a range as just this one drive, lording it over the 480GB maximum size that the SSDNow v300 range hit. The unit packs a Phison 3108 controller alongside nearly 1TB of storage all into a 7mm chassis, and it’s available to buy alone or in an upgrade pack complete with cables and a caddy for your old drive.
If you’ve been following SSD prices, you might notice that £400 for a terabyte isn’t the best value available. Kingston’s own v300 480GB SSD can be found for £150, so if you were looking at sticking a terabyte of SSD in your desktop, a rather obvious way to save £100 presents itself. However, there’s also the Samsung 840 Evo 1TB, which can be had for an even more tempting £290 at the time of writing.
Still, the Kingston is cheaper than the forthcoming Samsung 850 Pro 1TB, so perhaps its performance can justify its price. Its ATTO read and write scores of 553MB/s and 519MB/s are both very strong, besting Crucial’s M500 960GB drive, though the write speeds aren’t quite as fast as Samsung’s 840 Evo. The v310’s sequential read speed benchmark results of 502MB/s actually smash Kingston’s listed speed of 450MB/s, pleasingly. The other side of that coin, though, is that 450MB/s is also what’s listed for its write speed, but that came in at just 434MB/s. You could argue that it evens out, at least.
The drive’s 4k random writes were a tad feeble, with just 12MB/s read and 41MB/s write – a little embarrassing compared to the 42MB/s read and 110MB/s write of the Samsung 840 Evo. We weren’t hugely impressed by how it did in our real-world tests, either. Compressing a 5GB folder in 89 seconds isn’t a great score, while 261 seconds to transfer a 30GB folder is also weak.
The v300 and v310 series aren’t really intended to be hot rods, though. If you can deal with losing a few MB/s here and there, you do at least get some very impressive reliability figures. The v310 is rated for a frankly ludicrous 2,728TB of writes – enough to write around 2.5TB of data per day for its three-year warranty, or 1TB per day for 7.5 years. We’d kind of like to see a longer warranty than is offered, but it’s in line with its closest competitors, and the quoted reliability is hugely impressive anyway.
Really, our key reservation with the Kingston v310 has a simple solution: make it cheaper. And if you’ve been watching the SSD market, you’ll know there’s a good chance that will happen soon. At current prices, the Samsung 840 Evo is a more tempting buy. But if this can come close on price, we’d find that huge TBW rating a big comfort as regards the longevity of something costing hundreds of pounds. Matthew Bolton
Vital Statistics
Price £399
Manufacturer Kingston
Web www.kingston.com
Capacity 960GB
Memory type Micron 20nm MLC NAND
Memory controller Phison 3108
TBW 2,728TB
Warranty 3 years