Kingston Joins The PCIe 4.0 SSD Club With The KC3000

Another Fine Pairing Of Phison’s E18 And Micron 176-layer B47R Flash

The Kingston KC3000 is a new PCIe 4.0 NVMe 1.3 SSD available in sizes from 512GB to 4TB, with no overprovisioning but a decent amount of RAM cache.  The 2TB model reviewed by TechPowerUp sports 2GB of Kingston DDR4-2666, a 640GB pseudo-SLC cache and a lifespan of 1600 TBW, retailing for around $450.

That large cache size should prevent most users from ever seeing writes drop from over 5GB/s down to 1.5GB/s, unless you do tend to write a terabyte at a time.  If you do tend to write that much, make sure that you have some airflow in your case, as you might see brief moments of thermal throttling in intensive writes, but not enough to seriously degrade performance.

Apart from the need for a bit of help cooling, thie Kingston KC3000 is the best TLC drive that TechPowerUp has tested, often outperforming the competition by a fair amount; you will have to pay a premium for that performance though.