Kingston SSDNow V300 240 GB SATA III 

The true performance lies somewhere in between which is why we run our real world tests that showed the V300 to be no slouch against some of the best drives on the market.

Benchmark Results: The IOPS scores are great here on writes and a bit below the specifications on reads.

We've certainly seen some faster drives out there in the wild, and the SandForce controller is starting to really show its age now.

Kingston has also taken on more of the fabrication piece to help drive down costs to offer the drives at a lower price point.

Over the past 18 months, the price of SSDs has fallen dramatically, both in absolute dollars and cost-per-gigabyte.

With a great price-per-GB ratio and strong performance, the V300 earns our Editors' Choice for budget internal SSDs.

The notebook/desktop combo comes with an impressive box full of goodies: a pair of 3.5-inch mounting brackets for a PC, plus data and power cables, a 2.5-inch external USB 2.0 drive enclosure, a 7mm to 9.5mm adaptor so you can fit the drive into chunkier notebooks without it rattling around, an installation DVD and finally some hard drive cloning software.

Let's be honest, the majority of PC users do a whole lot of internet, mail, and light office document usage with a sprinkling of games and multimedia thrown in.

Finally, they also supply SATA power and data cables should you need them.

Speaking of Thunderbolt, ASUS also sent us over a sweet ThunderboltEX PCI-E card that goes right into the PCI-E x4 slot.

For the Kingston V300 120GB drive, the readout on CrystalDiskInfo 5.0.2 shows that both NCQ and S.M.A.R.T. are enabled, as well as TRIM and the interface is confirmed at SATA III (6Gbps).

Even older, Intel Core 2 Duo or AMD-based systems that don't support the SATA 6G standard will see a huge speed increase when combined with an SSD.

Currently the drive is available in just three capacities - 60GB, 120GB and 240GB - with each capacity available in four different options: bare drive, notebook upgrade, desktop upgrade and a combo notebook/desktop upgrade kit.

Conventional hard drives don't generally have this problem; models from the major manufacturers tend to perform similarly at the same capacity and price point.