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Kingston have been biding their time before releasing their take on a PCIe Gen 4 SSD, but it has finally arrived. The flagship KC3000 SSD uses a combination of Phison's E18 controller and the latest 176-layer NAND flash technology, with the 2TB model priced around the £350 mark.
The KC3000 line-up consists of four capacities; the entry-level 512GB, 1TB, 2TB (the drive we are reviewing) and the flagship, 4TB model. At the heart of the drive is Phison's PS5018-E18 8-channel controller and instead of the usual 96-layer 3D TLC NAND, Kingston has chosen Micron's latest 176-layer B47R 3D TLC NAND.
Kingston quote Sequential performance figures for the 2TB model as up to 7,000MB/s for reads and 7,000MB/s for writes. The rest of the line-up has the same 7,000MB/s Sequential read speed with the 512GB model rated at up to 3,900MB/s for Sequential writes with the 1TB at up to 6,000MB/s and up to 7,000MB/s for the flagship 4TB drive.
Random performance is listed as up to 1,000.000 IOPS for both read and writes. The 4TB drive gets the same rating, the 1TB get 900,000 IOPS /1,000,000 IOPS read/write respectively ratings while the 512GB drive gets up to 450,000 IOPS and up to 900,000 IOPS for reads and writes respectively.
Power consumption for the 2TB drive is listed as; 5mW idle, 0.36W average, up to 2.8W for reads and up to 9.9W for writes. Endurance for the drive is stated at 16000 TBW with Kingston backing it with a 5-year warranty.
Physical Specifications:
- Usable Capacities: 2TB.
- NAND Components: 176-layer 3D TLC NAND.
- NAND Controller: Phison PS5018-E18.
- Cache: 2GB DDR4-2666.
- Interface: PCIe 4.0 x4, NVMe 1.4.
- Form Factor: M.2, 2280.
- Dimensions: 80 x 22 x 3.5mm.
- Drive Weight: 9.7g.
Firmware Version: EIFK31.6.
