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It's a sign of just how swiftly the NVMe SSD market is maturing that drive manufacturers are starting to turn their attention away from the mainstream/high-end market segments to battle it out at the other end of the market where the real money is made – the entry level/value market space. The latest company to join the fray is Kingston with its A1000, priced at £135.
The A1000 is a single-sided M.2 2280 drive using a Gen 3.0 PCIe x2 interface with a three capacity line-up; 240GB, 480GB (the drive Kingston kindly supplied for review) and the flagship 960GB drive.
At the heart of the A1000 is a Phison PS5008-E8 four channel controller which in turn looks after Toshiba 256Gb BiCS 3D TLC NAND flash memory.
Kingston quotes a sequential read figure of up to 1,500MB/s across the range with writes quoted as up to 800MB/s for the 240GB drive, 900MB/s for the 480GB drive and up to 1,000MB/s for the 960GB drive.
The 240GB and 480GB drives share the same 4K random read figure of up to 100,000 IOPS with the 960GB drive capable of delivering up to 120,000 IOPS. Random writes are quoted as up to 80,000 IOPS for the 240GB drive, up to 90,000 IOPS for the 480GB and 100,000 for the 960GB unit.
TBW endurance figures for the range are; 150TB for the 240GB model, 300TB for the 480GB and 600TB for the 960GB drive. Kingston back the drives with a 5-year warranty.
Physical Specifications:
- Usable Capacities: 480GB
- NAND Components: Toshiba 256GbBiCS 3D TLC
- NAND Controller: Phison PS5008-E8
- Cache: Micron DDR3L
- Interface: PCIe x2 Gen 3.0 NVMe
- Form Factor: 2280 M.2
- Dimensions: 22 x 80 x 3.5mm
- Drive Weight: 7g
Firmware Version: E8FK11.G
