Kingston SSDNow V300 240GB Review

The first step after getting a new hard drive, especially in this case, was slaying the dragon. The dragon, as if you don’t know, requires slaying so that you can distill its heart into the two basic elements; dye so black that only a ninja can use it, and the force required to open blister packaging whilst minimising civilian casualties. Once the ritual was complete, I installed the SSDNow V300 easily with both cables, making it my second internal drive.

I had waited until now to get a solid state drive because the prices for the capacity were too high for my liking. At over £20 off, it was too good a deal to pass by, so I snatched it up and chucked it in. The thing that had almost convinced me to get one in the past was the promise of super-fast start-up speeds. Programs never seem slow to load on my HDD, but then I never knew any better, did I?

My first step was transferring Windows 7 to the new drive. I'd read a few guides that dealt with cloning, but those were a couple of years old. I told GameGrin's Editor-in-Chief my plans and he advised me to just drag and drop, rather than mess with cloning. Wish I'd known that before I cleared 200GB off of my HDD...

Turns out it's easiest to just do a clean install and drag everything over. With 223.5GB useable space I can say with certainty that I've had worse ratios of wasted space on phones over the years. The install was about as painless as you would expect, though of course I had to do a little reinstallation here and there, but it went well.

My shutdown time has decreased dramatically, though there hasn’t been as massive a hike in my boot up times as I was hoping. It’s still fast, don’t get me wrong, but I wanted near-instantaneous… Now it loads up and signs into Skype in about half the time it took to load up with no programs. Applications load up about the same speed, but my Windows Experience Index has gone from 5.8 to 7.0 thanks to the V300 so there is definitely an improvement.

As far as my experience with SSD hard drives go, this has been positive. It’s improved my user experience and, of course, given me more space to play with.