Kingston KC3000 PCIe 4.0 M.2 NVMe review

Memory (DDR4/DDR5) and Storage (SSD/NVMe) 367 Page 2 of 20 Published by

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Specifications & Features

Specifications & Features

Kingston as stated is offering four versions of the SSD; 512GB, 1TB, 2TB and 4TB, unfortunately not an 8TB model. For endurance, our tested 2TB model has been rated at 1600 TBW. The series will be fitted with TLC written 3D NAND flash memory (vertically stacked over 176 layers). This allows the company to offer proper storage volumes. So instead of using Planar NAND, 3D NAND is used. 3D TLC NAND is physical vertical NAND cell stacking not to be confused with chip stacking in a multi-chip package. In 3D NAND, NAND layers, not chips, are stacked in a single IC. The good news is continued cost reduction, smaller die sizes and more capacity per NAND chip. Also, installed NAND toolsets in the wafer fabs can, for the most part, be reused, thereby extending the useful life of fab equipment. Unleashed by the PCIe 4.0 ready AMD B550/X570 chipset and Intel Rocket Lake-S / Alder Lake-S / Z590/ Z690, the SSD reaches up to an advertised 7000 MB/sec sequential read – fourteen times the performance of many SATA SSDs and seventy times faster than some hard disk drives. The performance stems from the hugely increased bandwidth of PCIe 4.0 (PCI-Express Generation 4), a feature that will be made available to customers for the first time as part of the AMD X570 chipset and 3rd Generation AMD Ryzen Desktop Processors. Easily fitting into a PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 slot, the NVMe interface has been bumped upwards to the new 1.4 protocol and high-density TLC NAND combine with a Phison PS5018-E18 controller to enable a new level of single-drive SSD performance. Boasting staggering numbers.


Phison PS5018-E18 controller

Phison, based in Taiwan, is well-known for its flash NAND controllers, which have gained significant traction in recent years. In addition to being built on a Cortex-R5-based processor design, the PS5018-E18 controller is also constructed on TSMC's 12nm process technology. Furthermore, the controller includes three Cortex R5 cores running at 1GHz, as well as two Dual CoXProcessor 2.0 cores running at a lower clock speed that handle the host's requests as well as the SSDs' own NAND management algorithms. In addition, the controller supports the APST, ASPM, and the L1.2 standby power state for efficiency, as well as thermal throttling to guarantee that the system operates at a cool temperature. The MP600, like the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus, does, however, have a low throttle temperature restriction, similar to the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus. Thermal throttling is activated when the temperature rises above 68 degrees Fahrenheit. This approach dynamically reduces speed by approximately 50 MBps for every 1 degree Celsius above the temperature limit set by the manufacturer.  By upgrading this controller to NVMe revision 1.4, the transfer rate per channel has increased from 800MT/s to 1200MT/s. And when you do the arithmetic, you'll find that the maximum transfer speed for both sequential reads and writes is approximately 7GB/s. In addition, random read/write performance would be quoted at 1 million IOPS, and all of this would be accomplished with a projected peak energy usage of 3W just for the controller.


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Form Factor M.2 2280
Interface PCIe 4.0 NVMe
Capacities2 512GB, 1024GB, 2048GB, 4096GB
Controller Phison E18
NAND 3D TLC
Sequential Read/Write 512GB 7,000/3,900MB/s1024GB 7,000/6,000MB/s2048GB 7,000/7,000MB/s4096GB 7,000/7,000MB/s
Random 4K Read/Write1 512GB  up to 450,000/900,000 IOPS 1024GB  up to 900,000/1,000,000 IOPS 2048GB  up to 1,000,000/1,000,000 IOPS 4096GB  up to 1,000,000/1,000,000 IOPS
Total Bytes Written (TBW)3 512GB - 400TBW | 1024GB - 800TBW | 2048GB - 1.6PBW | 4096GB - 3.2PBW
Power Consumption 512GB  5mW Idle / 0.34W Avg / 2.7W (MAX) Read / 4.1W (MAX) Write1024GB ? 5mW Idle / 0.33W Avg / 2.8W (MAX) Read / 6.3W (MAX) Write2048GB ? 5mW Idle / 0.36W Avg / 2.8W (MAX) Read / 9.9W (MAX) Write4096GB  5mW Idle / 0.36W Avg / 2.7W (MAX) Read / 10.2W (MAX) Write
Storage Temperature -40°C~85°C
Operating Temperature 0°C~70°C
Dimensions 80mm x 22mm x 2.21mm (512GB-1024GB)80mm x 22mm x 3.5mm (2048GB-4096GB)
Weight 512GB-1024GB 7g / 2048GB-4096GB  9.7g
Vibration Operating 2.17G Peak (7-800Hz)
Vibration Non-operating 20G Peak (20-1000Hz)
MTBF 1,800,000 hours
Warranty/support4 Limited 5-year warranty with free technical support

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