Kingston SSDNow V310 960GB
Remember when we were at Computex and Kingston had given us a special sneek peek at their new SSDs? Well, the SSDNow V310 was among one of those drives, but we didn’t know when it was going to be launched. Today marks the day that Kingston launches their new SSDNow V310 SSD with a 960GB capacity, which they’re calling 1TB. Since it isn’t a 1024GB SSD, we’re not going to be calling it a 1TB SSD, even if Kingston is just because once you format this drive you’ll probably be looking at under 900GB of formatted space. We’ve included some of the photos that we took of that drive in our article so that you can get an idea of what this drive is capable of doing.
The drive does indeed fit the 2.5″ drive formfactor and is only 7mm thick, meaning that it can easily fit into most laptops or desktops. It is also SATA 3.0, meaning its capable of speeds up to 6 Gbps. And below, we’ve got a picture of it running in a system.
We also have some preliminary speeds, thanks to Kingston’s own performance benchmarks and as you can see, the drive is capable of sequential reads and writes of 500 MB/s and 485 MB/s respectively, which isn’t necessarily near the top of the pack, but it is fairly good for such a large drive using SATA 6 Gbps.
We’ve spoken to Kingston and they’ve told us that the SSDNow V310 960GB SSD will be available shortly, however there isn’t a price for the drive just yet. But we did some poking around and were able to find an online retailer that already has the drive and price listed at $555, which may just be a pricing placeholder. But for now, that’s all we’ve got to work with in terms of pricing. But what does make this drive great is the fact that you can basically migrate over an entire hard drive onto the SSD without worrying about if you’ll run out of space, which is still a legitimate concern for a lot of people. Affordable SSD storage is important and hopefully this is the sign that we’re getting towards large enough capacities that smaller HDDs (2TB and under) are irrelevant.
