Kingston UV300 240GB review: Only for budget buyers; performance junkies look elsewhere

Kingston is a popular name when it comes to RAM sticks, flash drives and their HyperX series of gaming accessories. Even in the SSD space, it has been around for quite a while and while its HyperX series SSDs cater to the enthusiast crowds, the UV series is a more value oriented SSD segment. The UV300 series comes in three storage variants - 120GB, 240GB and 480GB. We got the 240GB variant for testing. So let us see how it fares. Build and Features Kingston’s value drives have been using the same sort of design elements since their inception. So you have the familiar Kingston sticker with the red coloured logo on a dark matte gray metallic cover. It measures 7mm thick which lets you dock it in your laptop or ultrabook as well. The screws for opening up the SSD are located under the sticker on the front.     It uses Toshiba A19 TLC NAND chips - around eight of them.TLC NAND is more geared towards a budget SSD. TLC as the name implies means triple-level cell NAND, which means it can store three bits per cell which gives you eight voltage states - as opposed to four states with MLC NAND (which has 2-bits per cell) or two states on SLC (which has one bit per cell). This comes with its disadvantages such as lesser endurance than SLC and MLC but it offers a better capacity per cell which gives lower cost per GB. The blue-coloured PCB also holds the Nanya NT5CC128M16FP 256MB DDR3L cache chip. The Kingston UV300 is controlled by the Phison S3110-S10X 8-channel controller which has a quad-core CPU of which three processors are dedicated to flash management. The drive has a SATA 6 Gbps interface. Test Setup Processor: Intel Core i7-4770K Motherboard: ASRock Z87M Extreme4 RAM: 2 x 4GB GSkill RipjawsX OS Drive: Intel SSD, 80GB PSU: Cooler Master 800W Silent Pro Gold OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit Performance ATTO Benchmark This is the most popular storage benchmarking tool and allows you to check read and write speeds across various transfer sizes and queue depths. ATTO is also a good tool to check for the marketing spiel of SSD makers where they publish sequential read and write speeds on the packaging. The Kingston UV300 SSD is in line with its stated sequential read and write speeds. In fact it goes beyond the rated 550 / 490MB/s read/write speeds. AS SSD AS SSD is a benchmark tool built specifically for SSDs which uses incompressible data and calculates sequential and random read and write speeds and gives an overall score at the end. It also gives you the input/output operations per second or IOPS for each of those tests which is interesting. Apart from this you can also perform Copy Test where it creates test folders for large files simulating ISO, programs and games and measures the transfer speeds and duration.   While the read and write speeds for sequential and 4K read and write are not very far off from competition, it is in the IOPS section where you learn about the limitation of the Kingston UV300. We got the lowest IOPS with the UV300 SSD which means that as compared to competition the response time will be on the higher side - which means opening that Photoshop will take longer than it would on say the ZOTAC SSD which is wicked fast. PC Mark 7 PC Mark 7 is a complete PC benchmarking solution for Windows 7 having a dedicated Storage test module. It is a collection of workloads that isolate the performance of your PC’s SSD. The Secondary Storage test allows you to test drives other than your system drive. It simulates operations such as importing pictures, gaming, starting applications and so on. Anvil Storage Utilities Anvil Storage utilities is another versatile SSD benchmark tool which besides having an in-built SSD tool, also allows you the option to tweak the settings. Just like the AS SSD benchmark, you get a read, write and an overall score. The tables are more in-depth as it gives you response time, IOPS, MB read/written and finally the transfer speeds in MB/s. You can perform threaded I/O read and write tests where you can adjust block size as well as the queue depth. We ran the SSD test using 100 per cent incompressible and 46 per cent compression. Verdict and Price in India Kingston UV300 SSD is priced at around Rs 6,500 MRP which gives it a cost per GB of Rs 29/GB. A quick search online will show that the SSD is also selling for Rs 4,499 which makes it quite an affordable 240GB drive. For this price the UV300 makes sense if you are looking at an entry level SSD for your rig. The sequential read and write speeds are quite good for the UV300, but it has terrible IOPS. So while it will have a slightly higher response time than other drives seen above, it will certainly give a better performance over an HDD. If you can live with that, then go for the UV300. You will get a 3-year warranty.