Kingston SSDNow V310 960GB SSD Review

Final Thoughts & Conclusions

The Kingston SSDNow V310 960GB drive was designed to be a good drive at the value end of the consumer SSD market. Our testing of the drive found it to be a pretty solid drive with 552 MB/s read and 489MB/s write on the standard overlapped I/O benchmark in ATTO. The specifications show that this drive is rated at having up to 450MB/s read and write on ATTO, so our test drive was certainly performing well above that. When it came to random IOPS we used Anvil and found that the 4K QD16 IOPS performance was right around 26,000 IOPS Read and 14,000 Write. Kingston rates the Random 4K Read/Writes at around 27,000 IOPS and 10,500 IPS, so we are in the ballpark. The performance of the Kingston SSDNow V310 960GB drive wasn’t spectacular, but we were happy with how the Phison controller performed on a value class SSD. We are always apprehensive to recommend a drive based on a relatively unknown controller company, but Phison has had this controller out for a couple years and it has been pretty good and the firmware is mature. That is key as you seldom see end-user firmware updates on value SSDs unless there is a critical bug discovered and fixed.

Kingston SSDNow v310 960GB Drive Pricing:

• Kingston SSDNow V310 Stand-Alone Drive – SV310S37A/960G – $549.99 plus shipping
• Kingston SSDNow V310 Desktop Upgrade Kit – SV310S3D7/960G – $559.99 plus shipping
• Kingston SSDNow V310 Notebook Upgrade Kit – SV310S3N7A/960G – $559.99 plus shipping
• Kingston SSDNow V310 Desktop/Notebook Upgrade Kit – SV310S3B7A/960G

When it comes to pricing the Kingston SSDNow V310 960GB SSD runs about $0.57 per GB for the bare drive. That isn’t bad, but many might not consider that cheap enough and we’d have to agree. The problem we see with that kind of pricing is that there are other 960GB and 1TB drives out there with higher performance ratings at lower price points. For example the Crucial M500 960GB drive can be found for $443.99 shipped and has 80k random read/write IOPS. The newer Crucial M550 1TB drive is just $416.00 shipped and has 95k IOPS random read and 85k IOPS random writes. Then you have the Samsung EVO 840 at $431.99 shipped that has 98k IOPS random read and 90k IOPS random writes. We could keep going, but you should be getting the point by now. The Kingston SSDNow V310 is rated at just 40k IOPS random read and 20k IOPS random writes and costs over $100 more than competing drives that have higher specifications.

Overall the Kingston SSDNow V310 960GB SSD was found to be a solid drive, but the performance wasn’t anything extraordinary and neither is the pricing. The Kingston SSDNow V310 series might be considered a budget SSD, but Kingston needs to cut the price as this drive is priced too higher. Kingston brought this out as a low cost drive, but the pricing doesn’t reflect that right now. If Kingston can get the price of this drive down to $399 or $0.41 per GB we could see it selling well for those that want a tons of storage space.

Legit Bottom Line: The Kingston SSDNow V310 960GB SSD was found to be a solid drive, but we’d love to see the pricing lowered to be more competitive with the drives that are already available on the market.