The Kingston SSDNow series is the first SSD that I’ve got my hands on for review, before starting Hardware BBQ. It wasn’t really a great drive (as with others since that’s when 1st generation SSDs were rolling out) but now when you look at it, SSDs have come a long way all thanks to the development of NAND and SSD controllers by multiple companies, some of which even being used as high-performance portable drives, like the SanDisk Extreme 500 and the 900 series. Usually, these units are considered as budget variants.
The Kingston SSDNow UV300 comes with a Phison controller, and this is the first SSD drive that I am testing with this controller. A 240GB is a fair amount of space for many users, but this should tempt a lot of people picking these up as they cost lesser than the mainstream high-performance counterparts. Question is that how does it perform with a bit older mainstream SSDs.
Model Kingston SSDNow UV300 Form factor 2.5″ Interface SATA Rev. 3.0 (6Gb/s) – with backwards compatibility to SATA Rev. 2.0 (3Gb/s) Capacities 120GB, 240GB, 480GB Controller Phison S10 Baseline Performance Phison S10 (?) Compressible Data Transfer
(ATTO)120GB – 550MB/s Read and 350MB/s Write
240GB – 550MB/s Read and 490MB/s Write
480GB – 550MB/s Read and 510MB/s WriteIncompressible Data Transfer
(AS-SSD and CrystalDisk Mark)120GB – 505MB/s Read and 280MB/s Write
240GB – 510MB/s Read and 445MB/s Write
480GB – 510MB/s Read and 495MB/s WriteIOMETER Maximum Random 4k Read/Write 120GB – 95,000 IOPS and 13,000 IOPS
240GB – 95,000 IOPS and 20,000 IOPS
480GB – 95,000 IOPS and 26,000 IOPSRandom 4k Read/Write 120GB – 64,000 IOPS and 12,000 IOPS
240GB – 81,000 IOPS and 18,000 IOPS
480GB – 81,000 IOPS and 25,000 IOPSPCMARK Vantage HDD Suite Score 120GB, 240GB, 480GB – 81,000 PCMARK 8 Storage Bandwidth 120GB – 145MB/s
240GB and 480GB – 165MB/sPCMARK 8 Storage Score 120GB –4,805
240GB and 480GB – 4,860Anvil Total Score
(Incompressible Workload)120GB – 2,600
240GB – 2,950
480GB – 3,740Power Consumption 0.1W Idle / 0.36W Avg / 1.26W (MAX) Read / 4.14W (MAX) Write Storage temperature -40°C~85°C Operating temperature 0°C~70°C Dimensions 100.0mm x 69.9mm x 7.0mm Weight 120GB, 240GB, 480GB – 52g Vibration operating 2.17G Peak (7–800Hz) Vibration non-operating 20G Peak (10–2000Hz) Life expectancy 1 million hours MTBF Warranty/support Limited three-year warranty with free technical support Total Bytes Written (TBW) 120GB: 60TB
240GB: 120TB
480GB: 240TB![CDI 1]()
![UV300 Sys Info]()
Kingston also emphasized in its page that its using TLC chips for this SSD. Opening up this SSD is a bit tricky. The security Torx screws are on the front, under the label. You’ll need to removemove the label which will void the warranty. Speaking of which, Kingston provides three years warranty for this drive.
The top facing casing is plastic, the lower base is metallic. Kingston did a decent job of ensuring it’s of the same feel. There is a (thermal?) pad which is kept for the SSD controller, but it seems to have one-sided adhesive and has a rubber feel to it.
There is a total of eight Kingston labelled FD32808UCTI-B1 chips, a relabelled Toshiba A19 TLC. There’s also a Nanya NT5CC128M16FP-D1– a 256MB DDR3L Cache chip. All of it is controlled by Phison S3110-S10-X eight-channel controller. Only one side of the PCB is used for the 240GB capacity UV300.
It will be interesting to see which performs better, a newer budget class or an older mainstream SSD drives, namely SanDisk Ultra II and Extreme Pro 240GB SSDs.
The post Kingston SSDNow UV300 240GB SSD Review appeared first on Hardware BBQ.