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Kingston announces new wallet friendly SSDs
Another day, another new SSD range offering higher performance than the one announced the day before, oh, hang on, the new V200 series from Kingston isn't actually a high-end range of drives, instead Kingston has focused on good enough performance at a lower price point. The company claims that its new V200 series will offer close to twice the performance of its previous budget model, the V100, at a more attractive price point.
Another day, another new SSD range offering higher performance than the one announced the day before, oh, hang on, the new V200 series from Kingston isn't actually a high-end range of drives, instead Kingston has focused on good enough performance at a lower price point. The company claims that its new V200 series will offer close to twice the performance of its previous budget model, the V100, at a more attractive price point.
As always with Kingston, the new V200 series comes in a standard drive only option, a desktop upgrade kit and a notebook upgrade kit. The V200 series stands a mere 7mm tall (except the 256GB model), compared to 9.5mm for standard 2.5-inch drives and as such a plastic bracket is provided with all the bare drives and the notebook upgrade kit to allow for a snug fit. The notebook upgrade kit also comes with a USB enclosure for that old mechanical drive and the desktop kit comes with brackets for fitting the SSD in a 3.5-inch drive bay, as well as all the cables needed. Both kits are also supplied with drive cloning software.
Size wise the V200 series will be available in 64, 128 and 256GB SKUs. The performance isn't going to set anyone's world on fire, despite all drives featuring SATA 6Gbps interfaces. The 64GB model is rated at up to 260MB/s for sequential reads and a mere 100MB/s for sequential writes. The 128GB model hits 300MB/s for the reads and 190MB/s for the writes with the 256GB model featuring the same read speed as the 128GB model, but boosts the write speed to 230MB/s. That said, with the possible exception of the write speed of the 64GB model, this is significantly faster than any mechanical hard drive.
The press release talks about "up to 20 percent lower price than [the] V100" series of SSDs from Kingston, although doing a quick search online doesn't verify this. We found the 64GB model on sale in Canada of all places for C$126 (S$159), whereas the 64GB V100 retailed on the same website for a mere C$79 (S$100). The 128GB bare drive was on sale for C$209 (S$264) and the 256GB bare drive for C$444 (S$560). There are also plenty of other faster SSDs on sale for less, such as Corsair's Force 3 series of SSDs and Patriot's Pyro series. That said, this isn't official pricing from Kingston and it's possible we'll see different pricing in other regions.
Source: Kingston
