SSD bait and switch

[Grauniad]

Be very careful if you are considering buying a Kingston V300 model SSD.

Prices, when compared to other SSDs in the market, seem very attractive and in general SSDs perform outstandingly well.

However, in recent weeks some purchasers noted that the newer firmware versions of these devices are performing substantially worse than the earlier versions - including those that were made available to review sites.

In short, summarizing with an extract from the Anandtech article that appeared today:

The first generation V300 (which was sampled to media) used Toshiba's 19nm Toggle-Mode 2.0 NAND but some time ago Kingston silently switched to Micron's 20nm asynchronous NAND. The difference between the two is that the Toggle-Mode 2.0 interface in the Toshiba NAND is good for up to 200MB/s, whereas the asynchronous interface is usually only good for only ~50MB/s. The reason I say usually is that Kingston wasn't willing to go into details about the speed of the asynchronous NAND they use and the ONFI spec doesn't list maximum bandwidth for the single data rate (i.e. asynchronous) NAND. However, even though we lack the specifics of the asynchronous NAND, it's certain that we are dealing with slower NAND here and Kingston admitted that the Micron NAND isn't capable of the same performance as the older Toshiba NAND.

If you read here often, you may remember that I've referred to the SSD issues that probably was a major contributor to the demise of OCZ. That also involved a switch to a different NAND type (and mask size). Issues like this are not easily forgiven by consumers that get the short end of the stick. Often lawyers also just wait for this type of opportunity to initiate a class-action lawsuit and that is very costly to the firm.

This is about the time that I would advise you to strongly reconsider buying any Kingston products with a long warranty. :)

Anyway, if you like to see how Kingston justify this, here is their press release. I'll draw your attention to one part of it:

In order to achieve a balance of price and performance, we must maintain the flexibility to source NAND
Flash components from various Tier 1 NAND manufacturers. At times, this will mean that there is a
difference in benchmarked performance, where certain builds outperform our advertised specification
(450MB/s Read / Write) while other drives will meet the advertised specification. Regardless of revision, all
V300 SSDs still demonstrate 10x performance when compared to HDDs. (My emphasis.)

The way I interpret that is - "OK, if you come from a Hard Drive, then this is faster. Not necessarily as much faster as the versions we released early on and was reviewed by technical sites, and not necessarily faster than other SSDs in the market, but they're cheaper to make this way."

[teknotiss]

wow that's really bad marketing there! ::) if they'd said "this is a cost effective SSD and is much faster than HDD" they'd have bagged a bunch of happy low price users, as it is they are risking legal action, as you said G, and worse damaging their reputation. they were never to my knowledge a high end company, but their products have always been reliable for me, and cost effective too, so it seems mad to try to trick the reviews with one model and effectively release a lower performance one.
did they think no one would notice?

[Echo51]

Currently sitting on a V300, how would one benchmark this specifically? Eitherway, not a nice move...