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Image: Kingston

Kingston is also not denying the PCIe 4.0 interface and will soon be launching its first SSD with it. The Kingston KC3000 uses a fast and proven recipe with the M.2 form factor, Phison-E18 controller and TLC-NAND. Performance values ​​of up to 7,000 MB / s and 1 million IOPS are promised.

It was time for something new at the spearhead of Kingston’s consumer SSDs, as the last update in the form of the KC2500 was almost 1.5 years ago. This brought a little more performance than its predecessor KC2000, but with PCIe 3.0 technology lagged behind the current flagships of the competition.

Back to the top with the KC3000

Now, with the KC3000, Kingston is also changing to PCIe 4.0 with doubled data rates. Instead of a maximum of 3,500 MB / s with the KC2500, the KC3000 should not only read but also write data at 7,000 MB / s. At least this applies to the variants with 2 TB or 4 TB of storage space. The KC3000 with 1 TB should still achieve 7,000 / 6,000 MB / s and the model with 512 GB still 7,000 / 3,900 MB / s in sequential read / write. Similarly, the peak values ​​of one million IOPS for random reading and writing of 4K data only apply to the largest models.

Kingston KC3000 SSD (Image: Kingston)

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With these performance figures, Kingston has caught up and is in the absolute upper class. The values ​​suggest that Kingston combines the potent Phison E18 controller with Micron’s fast 176-layer NAND. In the data sheet, however, only “3D TLC” is mentioned, which also ensures a certain degree of flexibility. A DRAM cache is not mentioned, but is a must for the Phison E18.

A “cooler” made of graphene

Since the high performance also means a power consumption of up to 10.2 watts (4 TB model) when writing, Kingston uses a cooler. This consists of a thin strip with Graphas used, for example, by Team Group. However, this should not be enough on its own to prevent throttling under continuous load.

Kingston KC3000 SSD (Image: Kingston) Kingston KC3000 SSD (Image: Kingston)

The usual 5-year guarantee ends prematurely if the specified write volumes (Total Bytes Written) are exceeded during this period. The TBW are 400 TB, 800 TB, 1,600 TB and 3,200 TB and thus between the similarly designed Corsair MP600 XT (test) and Seagate FireCuda 530 (test).

The market launch should take place on October 25th, then it will show what the Kingston KC3000 will cost. However, prices in the range of 20 cents per gigabyte are likely. When converting, it should be noted that Kingston offers a little more storage space at the expense of a smaller reserve memory.