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

Product Information

Switching over to the Peak Performance test profile we see the drive in second place in the results chart behind Patriot's Viper VP4300 drive with its read score of 7,384MB/s. When it comes to the 4K QD32 T16 test, the KC3000 sits in the top position with a read result of 668,752 IOPS with writes at 548,450 IOPS. The goal of the benchmark is to show meaningful real-world performance differences between fast storage technologies such as SATA, NVMe, and Intel’s Optane. The Full System Drive Benchmark uses 23 traces, running 3 passes with each trace. It typically takes an hour to run. To get a measure of how much faster PCIe NVMe drives are than standard SATA SSDs we use the same files but transfer to and from a 2TB Kioxia Exceria Plus drive:

In testing, the Kingston KC3000 edged out the Seagate FireCuda 530 and Corsair MP600 Pro XT and it delivered faster random 4K read speeds than even the Samsung 980 Pro, our previous (NAND-based) record-holder. Its aluminum and graphene label kept it cool enough under most heavy workloads and even managed well with no airflow. Even a simple AC-powered 20" box fan blowing into the open side panel will 'flood' the motherboard's surface with fresh air. (I assume the SSD is slotted into the mobo directly, and not via an adapter) Random 4K performance is quoted as up to 1,000,000 IOPS for both reads and writes for the 2TB and 4TB drives, the 1TB drive gets the same 1,000,000 IOPS write rating but with a 900,000 IOPS read rating. The entry-level 512GB drive is rated at up to 450,000 IOPS and up to 900,000 IOPS for random reads and writes respectively. The side of the PCB holding the controller is covered by a label incorporating a graphene aluminium heat spreader but the product label covering the components on the other side of the PCB is just a plain one. Under testing, we didn't seem to have any throttling issues but it would be a smart move to use any motherboard cooling technology to keep everything cool.

A Spacious High-Performance SSD

While the flash interface speed played a big part in its victories, they were also achieved due in part to a larger dynamic SLC cache than compared to the Seagate and Corsair. Although the trade-off is a slower empty-to-fill time, the KC3000 is still tuned well for most gamers, prosumers, and storage enthusiasts. Kingston rate the Sequential performance of the KC3000 as up to 7,000MB/s for both reads and writes. The fastest read test result, 7,400MB/s, confirms the official figure while the best write figure of 6,919MB/s isn't that far short of the official maximum. The best 4K random figures we saw was when testing the drive with the Peak Performance profile, with the drive producing a peak of 668,752 IOPS with writes at 548,450 IOPS. However both of these a well short of the official 1,000,000 IOPS maximum figures for both.

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. 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.This SSD is designed for use in desktop and notebook computer workloads and is not intended for Server environments.

We used CrystalDiskMark 8 to test the random performance of the drive at lower queue depths (QD1 – QD8 where most of the everyday workloads occur) using 1 to 4 threads. The Phison PS5018-E18 is an 8-channel controller built on a 12nm process using triple Arm Cortex R5 cores along with a pair of Phison Proprietary CoXprocessors making a total of five cores. The E-18 uses the Phison 4th Gen LDPC engine and supports End-to-End Data Path Protection, SmartECC and AES 128/256-Bit hardware encryption (although this isn't implemented in the KC3000). It also includes thermal protection by making use of thermal throttling if, the drive exceeds 84˚ C. The "terabytes written" spec is a manufacturer's estimate of how much data can be written to a drive before some cells begin to fail and get taken out of service. (TBW tends to scale 1:1 with capacity, and that's true with the KC3000.) Kingston's warranty for the KC3000 is good for five years or until you hit the rated TBW figure in data writes, whichever comes first.Kingston's KC3000 drive handled the rigours of the PCMark10 Full System Drive benchmark very well producing some strong figures from the test traces. It averaged 245MB/s for the six Adobe startup tests and 469MB/s for the five using Adobe test traces helped in no small part by the 1,071MB/s result for the Adobe Photoshop (heavy use) trace. Although it didn't quite match its rated sequential read and write speeds in our tests, the Kingston KC3000 proved to be a speedy PCI Express 4 NVMe internal drive. It generally did well in our benchmarks—particularly in PCMark 10, which measures a drive's speed in everyday tasks such as loading different programs—though poorly in the AS-SSD benchmarks that involve transferring folders of small files.

As for the Kingston KC3000’s thermals, the heat spreader does a good job at distributing the heat across the componentry and away from the controller. When tested without airflow, the controller region of the heat spreader measured 78 degrees Celsius at its hottest once we wrote roughly 1TB of data to the SSD sequentially.The Renegade Fury measured 27C at idle and hit above 75C with sustained writes. The drive exhibited some throttling after about 1TB of writes, which is a large amount. The drive’s performance scaled neatly with temperature and the addition of airflow helped keep it from throttling. It’s possible Kingston designed this drive to perform within a tighter thermal envelope to maintain reliability.