Kingston SSDNow V+200 120GB SSD Review

Inside the V+200

Kingston has started a trend of using security Torx screws to hold their drives together require specialized tools to open them. Luckily, we were prepared had the V+200 case open post-haste.

They employ a thermal pad on one side to protect and the NAND while keeping it cool.

As usual, one side of the PCB is populated only by NAND flash modules and in this case, there are total of eight modules on this side.

The thermal pad actually removes the ink that highlights the etching on the chips making it a little tough to read but these are Intel branded MLC NAND flash chips with 25nm architecture with part number 29F64G08ACME3. They are asynchronous in design and 8GB in density for a total capacity of 128GB (1GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes).

On the opposite side, you can see the shadow of where the thermal pad rests against this side of the drive. The controller lies on the left side with the remaining eight NAND modules to the right.

Joining the long list of SandForce drives, the V+200 sports the SF-2281 controller – which is now owned by LSI if you haven’t heard, although still retains the SandForce name. This controller runs sans cache and relies on real time compression to boost writes. This is something it does very adeptly although that reliance on compression is also its Achilles heel as incompressible data write scores take a dive in comparison as you’ll see in the benchmarks. It does do a great
job with drive maintenance (even without TRIM enabled such as in RAID 0 mode) and has proven to be very reliable. With its DuraClass technology, it handles
error correction, wear-leveling, 256-AES encryption, and compression
duties among other things.