Introduction

Kingston already has two of the very best solid state drive series on the market from their partnership with Intel. The E and M Series have proven themselves time and time again as the best all around solid state drives on the market. So far it doesn't matter what the competitors have thrown together, the Intel controllers found in the E and M Series have been able to prevail in nearly all real world tests.

Kingston has another drive in their stable. This one isn't about blazing performance or high capacity. The Kinston SSDNow V Series is all about affordability and accessibility; just think of the V as Value. Unlike the E (Enterprise) and M (Mainstream) SSDNow Series drives, the V class uses an updated JMicron controller with 64K cache. Don't be turned off by the name so fast, the problematic JMicron controller only used 16K of cache so the issues of the past shouldn't apply here, but we will test to verify.

Since the SSDNow V Series is all about value, we have to talk about the cost in the introduction. Just how low has Kingston been able to take this new line of products? The 64GB model that we are testing here today is currently available at Newegg for 133.99 USD. Of course, 64GB doesn't give us a whole lot of capacity to play around with, so we will talk about the larger drives as well on the next page.