Kingston NV2 1TB SSD Review

The entry-level Gen 4 SSD market segment is, by its nature, rapidly becoming a highly competitive one. Aiming for a slice of the action is Kingston with its NV2 drive, a successor to the PCIe Gen 3×4 NV1 drive.

The drive is a DRAM-less design using a 4-channel control which makes use of HMB (Host Memory Buffer) technology instead of a dedicated onboard DRAM IC.

As to the make of the controller and NAND, well that's where things get a bit interesting. It seems that Kingston is being flexible with the components the drive uses as long as the Sequential performance, interface and endurance ratings remain as per the specifications. So the drive has been reported as using either the Phison PS5021-E21T controller, or as in the case of our review sample, Silicon Motion's SM2267XT. Either way, it's a DRAM-less 4-channel controller with a NAND transfer rate of 1600 MT/s per channel. Similarly, it's been seen with two types of NAND, 112-Layer BiCS5 3D TLC or 144-layer QLC. Our review sample is sporting the QLC option.

Kingston rate the Sequential read/write performance of the 1TB NV2 as up to 3,500MB/s and 2,100MB/s respectively. When tested with the ATTO benchmark we got test results that confirmed and even bettered the official write rating at 2,400MB/s. Tested reads came up a little short of the official maximum at 3.180MB/s. However, switching over the CrystalDiskMark 8 benchmark we could confirm both official figures with default test results of 3,672MB/s and 2,621MB/s for read and writes respectively.

Kingston doesn't list any 4K random performance figures on the specification sheet for the drive, but the fastest we saw came from when the drive was tested with the Peak Performance profile of CrystalDiskMark 8. The fastest read figure, 201,561 IOPS, came from when the drive was using compressible data while the fastest write performance, 401,239 IOPS, came when the drive was being tested with incompressible data.

The drive doesn't come with any form of the heatsink and it does get warm when pushed but we didn't see any signs of throttling when the drive was being tested.

Kingston’s SSD management utility SSD Manager, may not be as feature-rich as some of its competitors but without all the bells and whistles and funky GUIs, it's still a pretty useful tool. It's regularly updated, will automatically detect any firmware updates as well as displaying drive status, temperatures and SMART information.

We found the 1TB Kingston NV2 on Box for £43.49 (inc VAT) HERE.

Pros

• Price.
• Decent real-life performance.

Cons

• 3-year warranty is a bit mean.
• Not the fastest Gen 4 drive we've seen.
• Components may differ.

KitGuru says: It may not set the world on fire with its performance and the hardware might be different from our review sample, but at the end of the day, it's still a 1TB Gen 4 drive for under fifty quid. 

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