Disclosure: This review unit is provided by Kingston
Introduction, Specifications and Closer Look
With a silver casing and its trademark logo on the front, Kingston SSDNow UV400 seems to be an updated variant of the previous version, the SSDNow UV300. It assures the baseline performance (using ATTO) of up to 550MB/s read and 490MB/s write, backed with a three-year warranty support. The Kingston SSDNow UV300 that I reviewed earlier used a Phison controller. That unit’s availability was very limited with countries like India. The SSD did attract some interest because it was a cost-effective solution to get a larger SSD or an entry-level for general purposes. Kingston wasn’t the first to target the entry-level market.
The UV400 has four storage variants, 120GB, 240GB, 480GB and the 960GB. As the title suggests, this is a 480gig variant.
This SSD does not have a spacer for notebooks with 9.5 mm HDD cages. Strange! Notebook users benefit from a faster storage over the pre-installed HDD that’s typically 5,400 RPM at the time of purchase. It’s a bare minimum. Desktop users and notebook or ultrabook users with 7mm z-axis HDD bays wouldn’t mind.
Kingston places SSDNow as low-cost drives, while HyperX is for the mid-to-high end.
The complete specifications are as follows:
Form factor: 2.5″
Interface: SATA Rev. 3.0 (6Gb/s) – with backwards compatibility to SATA Rev. 2.0 (3Gb/s)
Capacities: 120GB, 240GB, 480GB, 960GB
Controller: Marvell 88SS1074
NAND: TLC
Baseline Performance:
Data Transfer (ATTO):
- 120GB — up to 550MB/s Read and 350MB/s Write
- 240GB — up to 550MB/s Read and 490MB/s Write
- 480GB — up to 550MB/s Read and 500MB/s Write
- 960GB — up to 540MB/s Read and 500MB/s Write
Maximum Random 4k Read/Write (IOMETER):
- 120GB — up to 90,000 IOPS and 15,000 IOPS
- 240GB — up to 90,000 IOPS and 25,000 IOPS
- 480GB — up to 90,000 IOPS and 35,000 IOPS
- 960GB — up to 90,000 IOPS and 50,000 IOPS
Power Consumption: 0.672W Idle / 0.693W Avg / 0.59W (MAX) Read / 2.515W (MAX) Write
Storage temperature: -40°C~85°C
Operating temperature: 0°C~70°C
Dimensions: 100.0mm x 69.9mm x 7.0mm
Weight: 57g
Vibration operating: 2.17G Peak (7–800Hz)
Vibration non-operating: 20G Peak (10–2000Hz)
Life expectancy: 1 million hours MTBF
Warranty/support: Limited 3-year warranty with free technical support
Total Bytes Written (TBW):
- 120GB: 50TB
- 240GB: 100TB
- 480GB: 200TB
- 960GB: 400TB
The casing is metal. There’s a small thermal pad for the controller and the cache. Kingston uses Marvell 88SS1074 four-channel controller and 15nm Toshiba TLC flash chips. The cache this PCB uses is a 70mm Nanya NT5CC256M16CP 4Gb DDR3L chip. Kingston SSDNow UV300 uses Phison S10 controller and Toshiba A19 TLC.
Kingston SSDNow is tested with 0C3FD6SD firmware which was the latest one available at the time of writing. The drive gives you a formatted space of 447 GB
Note the cost of per GB depending on the country you purchase it from:
Kingston does not sell its 960GB variant anywhere, despite mentioning it in their product website. These drives are cheaper in India compared to the US and the UK even looking at per dollar conversion at the time of writing
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