Kingston KC3000 PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD - High-performance storage for desktop and laptop PCs -SKC3000S/1024G

Product Information

Kingston includes a key for Acronis True Image HD cloning software to make the transition from your old drive to the KC3000 just a bit easier. You also have access to Kingston's SSD Manager software so you can monitor drive health, status reports, secure data deletion, and more. These are optional features; the drive can be physically installed and initialized through Windows in just a few minutes without any extra software required. This SSD is designed for use in desktop and notebook computer workloads and is not intended for Server environments. The Kingston KC3000 looks great on paper, but how does it really perform? I ran a bunch of tests using an ABS Challenger (ALI589) with Intel B560 chipset on a Gigabyte DS3H motherboard, 16GB of dual-channel DDR4 RAM, and 11th Gen Intel Core i5-11400F CPU.

Based on “out-of-box performance” using a PCIe 4.0 motherboard. Speed may vary due to host hardware, software and usage. In PCMark 10's overall storage test, the KC3000 had the second highest score, edged out by the Crucial P5 Plus. It posted the highest score in the Call of Duty gaming test and the second highest in Overwatch. It also had a high score in launching Adobe Photoshop, tied with the ADATA S70 Blade, and had the best scores in PCMark's ISO and file copy tests. Unsurprisingly, Kingston quotes their new KC3000 drive with a pretty impressive performance profile with read and write speeds of 7GB/s and 7GB/s, respectively, for the 2TB and 4TB models. Random 4K performance is quoted to reach up to 1 million IOPS for both reads and writes. These numbers are exactly what the Phison E18 controller indicates it tops out at.The Kingston KC3000 is the company’s latest premium SSD offering available in the industry-standard M.2 2280 form factor and in capacities from 512GB to 4TB. Specifically designed for enthusiasts and power users looking to get the most out of the new NVMe Gen4 interface, Kingston indicates that the KC3000 is best suited for 3D rendering and 4K+ content creation software applications. For reliability, the KC3000 has an MTBF of 1,800,000 hours and an endurance rating (total bytes written) of 1.6PBW for the 2TB capacity model. The latter value is noticeably lower than the Seagate Firecuda 530‘s 2.55PBW. It’s higher than Corsair though, which continues this inconsistent endurance spec on E18 SSDs. Full capacities available from 512GB to 4096GB to meet your data storage requirements. PCIe 4.0 NVMe technology. Compact M.2 design fits easily into small-form-factor (SFF) systems, desktops and laptop PCs. Low-profile graphene aluminium heat spreader.

Our 1TB KC3000 sample absorbed 369GB of data at a rate of 6,050 MBps before degrading to roughly 1,015 MBps for the remainder of the test. Unfortunately, the KC3000 did not recover any of its SLC cache during the idle recovery rounds, but its write speed measured roughly 1.9 GBps instead of 1 GBps. Power Consumption and Temperature Next, we switched over to our VDI full clone test. For our boot profile, the Kingston KC3000 SSD peaked at 129,099 IOPS at a latency of 261.5µs. This was good enough for second place, though well behind the first place WD SN850. The Kingston KC3000 wants to be in the conversation with Gen4 SSD leaders like the Samsung 980 Pro, WD SN850, and FireCuda 530. The KC3000 certainly showed that it can compete at that level, as it outpaced the popular Samsung drive in virtually all of our tests, especially its bar-setting setting transfer speeds in sequential reads. All of this combined makes the KC3000 an impressive release from Kingston, and a drive we highly recommend for enthusiasts and content creators. The on test that still sets the FireCuda 530 apart from the rest is the 450GB sustained write. The KC3000’s time is nothing to sneeze at however. Shorter bars are better.All of these tests leverage the common vdBench workload generator, with a scripting engine to automate and capture results over a large compute testing cluster. This allows us to repeat the same workloads across a wide range of storage devices, including flash arrays and individual storage devices. Our testing process for these benchmarks fills the entire drive surface with data, then partitions a drive section equal to 5% of the drive capacity to simulate how the drive might respond to application workloads. This is different than full entropy tests which use 100% of the drive and take them into a steady state. As a result, these figures will reflect higher-sustained write speeds. Even better and where it matters more. This time the 1TB KC3000 beats its 2TB sibling and turns in the second-best performance we've seen to date. Outstanding. 3DMark SSD Gaming Test