Kingston SSDnow M2 SATA 120GB Solid State Drive Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

In the UK, we can find the Kingston SSDnow M.2 SATA drive for £59.99 at overclockers UK, for £54.14 at Scan while Amazon UK has it listed for £55.24. Our American readers can pick up this drive for $95.04 at NewEgg and for $86.99 at Amazon. German readers can find the drive starting at €64.99 via Geizhals. For £0.45 per GB of storage, you get a solid performing boot drive for your system. A bargain in my opinion for a drive with this capacity.

Overview

When you buy a M.2 SATA module, you don’t get much in the form of accessories. But that is mostly due to the fact that you don’t need any. The safety screw is located on your PCIe adapter or motherboard and there is no need for cables or anything else. The joys of modules, plug it in, set your BIOS options and you’re done.

The Kingston SSDnow M.2 SATA drive did extremely well in our benchmarks. I have not seen a Solid State drive with that few fluctuations and so stable figures in their results prior to this drive. The Kingston M.2 speeds through all benchmarks at full speed and in a straight line. This tiny gum-stick shaped M2280 module has left a serious impression here. The read performance is well above the 500MB/s mark and actually closer to the 550MB/S mark at most times. It even peeks above the 600MB/s during the random read tests thanks to the M.2 interface. The write speeds aren’t the best and they’re located around the 350MB/s for the most parts, but this is a drive designed as boot-drive and write speeds aren’t that important here. It can mostly be contributed to the size and the 240GB model should perform better in that area.

There is no doubt that the Kingston M.2 SATA drive has left a permanent impression on me and has made me rethink my entire storage setup in my personal rig. This would sure be a great bootdrive for anyone, may you be using a small form factor portable or just a full-fledged custom built PC with a M.2 SATA slot.

Pros:

• Extremely stable performance
• Fast transfer speeds
• Cheap price for what you get.

Cons:

• Write and compression test suffered a little bit

“Kingston has created a true monster in a tiny body with the SSDnow M.2 SATA 120GB. The extremely stable performance and great figures impressed us and I’m sure this would make a great boot-drive in any system. And it’s one that is relative cheap at the same time.”

Thanks to Kingston for providing us with this review sample.