Kingston NV3 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD Review (2TB)

If you’re looking to power-up your existing system or start a whole new system, the Kingston NV3 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD provides a high-capacity performance boost on a budget. Powered by a Gen 4×3 NVMe controller with lower power consumption (perfect for notebooks and laptops), this new product from Kingston boasts read speeds of up to 6000MB/s and write speeds of 5000MB/s (*).

The Kingston NV3 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD also has a very small form factor that measures at 22mm x 80mm x 2.3mm with a feathery weight of just 7 grams and it comes in the following sizes – 500GB, 1TB, 2TB and 4TB. Perfect for smaller systems, including notebooks.

The unit comes with Kingston’s limited three year-warranty plus Acronis’ cloning software which is ideal for transferring data from your existing drive to the new one. The Kingston NV3 PCIe 4.0 VNMEs SSD is powered by a Silicon Motion SM2268XT2 controller, 3D NAND (non-volatile flash memory), has a 640TBW endurance rating for the 2TB model plus a MTBF (mean time between failures) of 2,000,000 hours. It’s also affordably priced from around $209AUD (Sep 2024) online.

Kingston NV3 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD Specifications

• Form factor: M.2 2280
• Interface: PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe
• Capacities: 500GB, 1TB, 2TB, 4TB
• (*) Sequential read/write
  500GB – 5000/3000MB/s
  1TB – 6000/4000MB/s
  2TB to 4TB3 – 6000/5000MB/s
• NAND: 3D
• Endurance (total bytes written)
  500GB – 160TB
  1TB – 320TB
  2TB – 640TB
  4TB – 1280TB
• Storage temperature: -40°C~85°C
• Operating temperature: 0°C~70°C
• Dimensions: 22mm x 80mm x 2.3mm
• Weight: 7g (all capacities)
• Vibration non-operating: 20G (10-1000Hz)
• MTBF: 2,000,000 hours
• Warranty/Support: Limited 3-year warranty with free technical support

Benchmarks

The first test was CrystalDiskMark that is disk benchmark software designed to quickly test the performance of your hard drives. The drive was tested on an Intel Core i9-14900KS system with a fresh install of Windows 11. The results of CrystalDiskMark mirrored the advertised speeds of Kingston.

Next up was AS SSD Benchmark that is used to determine the performance of Solid State Drives (SSD) and contains six synthetic and three copy tests. From a sequential perspective, it was slightly lower than the speeds reported by Kingston.

The other two tests were PCMark that measures the performance of your PC using tests based on real-world applications and activities and 3DMark that measures your system from a gaming / graphics perspective but both have storage tests.

Given that the Kingston NV3 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD is a budget storage option, it did score on the lower end of the spectrum when compared to mid to high-end options. However for the regular PC user, the Kingston NV3 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD still delivers fast read and write times. Given that this SSD is DRAM-less, it means that mapping is stored on the NAND which is slower than DRAM, however it is cheaper.

Anecdotally, a fresh system of Windows 11 was super fast with a boot-up speed of 20 seconds. Copying 100GB of data (files / directories) from another NVMe drive to the Kingston NV3 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD took 125 seconds and to transfer the other way 50 seconds.

Final Thoughts?

The Kingston NV3 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD is an affordably priced drive that is perfect for users wanting to upgrade their systems or add additional storage without a high cost. This is achieved by Kingston by having it DRAM-less and also lowering the terabytes written rating which is 160TBW. So although it is on the lower end of the spectrum in terms of performance, it hasn’t been designed to be top tier but rather an affordable storage option.