Kingston SSDNow V+100 256 Gb

Kingston SSDNow V+100 256GB Upgrade Bundle review

There's no such thing as a cheap solid state drive. But you do at least have the choice between merely pricey and downright punitive. The new Kingston SSDNow V+100 256GB falls into the former camp.At around £375 for 256GB of capacity, it's funny money compared to a conventional magnetic drive of similar or even much greater capacity.But it's still over £100 cheaper than the priciest 256GB SATA SSDs, such as the new Samsung SSD 470 Series 256GB.So, what do you get?The all important controller chip is a tweaked version of Toshiba's T6UG1XBG. Perhaps not the best on the market, but it does have one thing going for it: an aggressive garbage cleaning utility. In theory, this means the Kingston SSDNow V+100 256GB should maintain performance over time without the help of the drive-cleaning Windows 7 TRIM command. That's just one reason why Apple, for example, uses the T6UG1XBG in its MacBook laptops. Mac OS X, you see, doesn't support TRIM. Box fresh SSDs are all very well, but they don't stay that way for long. Before testing, we give every SSD a going over by first installing a full copy of Windows 7 and then filling it to the brim with data. With early SSDs, this often exposed long-term performance problems. Happily, the latest SSDs take this sort of abuse in their stride.