Kingston V310 960GB SSD Review

1. Introduction2. Kingston V310 960GB 3. Kingston V310 960GB (High Res Gallery)4. Testing Methodology5. Crystaldiskmark6. ATTO Disk Benchmark7. AS SSD8. IOMETER9. Closing Thoughts10. View All Pages

Kitguru analyses many Solid State Drives every month and we had high hopes for the new Kingston V310 960GB. Unfortunately we can't help but feel rather disappointed with the results produced.

The Kingston V310 960GB was clearly designed with the budget enthusiast market in mind and our testing shows that it delivers quick, steady sequential read and write transfers peaking at 555 MB/s and 490 MB/s respectively. This is better than official Kingston literature which quotes ATTO read and write speeds at 450 MB/s.

The Phison 3108 controller hasn't featured in many of our Solid State Drive reviews, but it has been available now for a couple of years and the firmware seems fairly robust and mature. There also appears to be a very low failure rate for this controller based on information published online.

The Kingston V310 960GB suffers when dealing with incompressible data – the final scores in AS SSD substantiate the 4K findings in CrystalDiskMark. The drive will simply not keep up with market leaders such as the Samsung 840 Evo 1TB or the AMD R7 Series 240GB in this area.

IOMETER IOPS performance also proved disappointing, hitting 45,475 in the 4k random read test. This dropped to just below 20,000 in the 4k random write test. This falls some way short of the OCZ Vertex 460 and Samsung 840 EVO 1TB results, which peak between 80,000 and 90,000.

In the budget sector, sales success all comes down to pricing and the Kingston V310 960GB faces some incredibly tough challenges. The Kingston drive is available from DABS at £409.99 inc vat. CCL have it in stock for £409.96 inc vat. A year ago this was actually quite competitive, but today you can get the Samsung 840 Evo 1TB for £289.99 inc vat from Amazon. The Crucial M500 960GB is available for £299.99 inc vat.

This positions the Kingston V310 960GB between £110 and £120 more expensive than faster performance budget drives with equal or greater capacity. The price needs to drop significantly before the V310 960GB deserves an award. If Kingston dropped the price to match Crucial and Samsung competing drives it would have scored higher, but at £409.99 it proves extremely difficult for us to recommend.

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Pros:

• excellent sequential read and write speeds.
• controller shows reliability.

Cons:

• overpriced.
• 4k performance.
• incompressible data.
• outperformed by Samsung 840 EVO 1TB.

Kitguru says: If the price dropped to £299.99 it might stand a chance this year, but at £409.99 it is very unlikely to sell to the educated enthusiast audience.

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