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

Product Information

The best Sequential read test score we saw was the 7.428MB/s when using our custom 128KB settings for CrystalDiskMark 8, which not only confirmed the official figure of 7,000MB/s, it bettered it too. The best tested Sequential write performance figure came from the CrystalDiskMark 8 Peak Performance profile (using compressible data) at 6,919MB/s, just shy of the official 7,000MB/s. After saturating its SLC cache at a consistent 6.4GBps, the KC3000 wrote at roughly 1.6 GBps until it filled. The SLC cache didn’t recover at idle within our 30-minute test window but the drive’s write speed managed to improve to 3-4 GBps in each of the following test rounds. Power Consumption and Temperature The Kingston KC3000 slowed down some in sequential writes. Here, it had peaks of 27,090 IOPS (or 1.69GB/s) and 336.3µs latency, placing 4 th among the test drives.

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 990 Pro takes the lead with read latency and the P44 Pro with write latency and we might give the nod to the latter overall, but it’s fairly close. The Fury Renegade simply trails some of the newer drives, but real world performance between them is going to be extremely close. Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery When it comes to benchmarking storage devices, application testing is best, and synthetic testing comes in second place. While not a perfect representation of actual workloads, synthetic tests do help to baseline storage devices with a repeatability factor that makes it easy to do apples-to-apples comparison between competing solutions. These workloads offer a range of different testing profiles ranging from “four corners” tests, common database transfer size tests, to trace captures from different VDI environments. 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. In all test runs, we rebooted the system, ensured all temp and prefetch data was purged, and waited several minutes for drive activity to settle and for the system to reach an idle state before invoking a test. All of the drives here have also been updated to their latest firmware as of press time. Where applicable, we would also typically use any proprietary NVMe drivers available from a given manufacturer, but all of the drives featured here used the Microsoft driver included with Windows 11.The new Kingston offering is also the latest Gen4 SSD to use the effective combination of the Phison PS5018-E18 controller and Micron’s B47R 3D TLC NAND. The E18 leverages the new TSMC 12nm process node (a significant improvement from the previous 28nm), which increases performance by up to 25% over the previous generation. This noticeable difference allows greater power efficiency and lower thermal output. All of the combined means faster potential performance of SSDs. We previously saw the E18 used inside drives like the Seagate FireCuda 530 and Corsair MP600 Pro XT, and expect more of the same impressive numbers in our Kingston KC3000 charts. Enter the Kingston KC3000, a wallet-friendly model available in 512GB, 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB configurations with no compromises to the performance. Kingston’s SSD management utility, SSD Manager, may not be as feature-rich as some of its competitors but without all the bells and whistles and funky GUI’s, it will automatically detect any firmware updates as well as displaying drive status, temperatures and SMART information. At a QD of 1, the KC3000 sits in the bottom half of our Sequential read results chart but, as the queue depth deepens, the drive moves up the performance chart until at QD32 it's only beaten by Patriot's Viper VP4300 drive.

We used CrystalDiskMark 8‘s custom settings to test the Sequential read and write performance of the drive through a range of queue depths. The setup for the tests is listed below. The 2TB Fury Renenage maintains the large, dynamic cache of the KC3000. The cache spans the entire breadth of the drive, meaning that all of the native TLC may run in pSLC mode. The precise size will change as the drive is filled. In this performance mode the drive writes up to 6.8 GBps before tumbling down to around 1.7 GBps when folding after the cache is exhausted.The KC3000 line-up consists of four capacities; the entry-level 512GB, 1TB, 2TB (the drive we are reviewing) and the flagship, 4TB model. At the heart of the drive is Phison's PS5018-E18 8-channel controller and instead of the usual 96-layer 3D TLC NAND, Kingston has chosen Micron's latest 176-layer B47R 3D TLC NAND. However, the smaller capacity allows for more redundancy provision on the Fury and in turn better write endurance. Where the 2TB KC3000 is rated at 1,600TB of write endurance, the 2TB Fury Renegade gets a 2,000TB rating. In reality, very few users are going to flirt with 1,600TB of writes, let alone 2,000TB. Adobe Illustrator – starting the application until usable Adobe Premiere Pro – starting the application until usable. IOMeter is a well-respected industry standard benchmark. However, despite our results with IOMeter scaling as expected, it is debatable as to whether or not certain access patterns actually provide a valid example of real-world performance. The access patterns we tested may not reflect your particular workloads, for example. That said, we do think IOMeter is a reliable gauge for relative throughput, latency, and bandwidth with a given storage solution. In addition, there are certain highly-strenuous workloads you can place on a drive with IOMeter, that you can't with most other storage benchmark tools. Armed with the fastest flash to ship from Micron yet and Phison’s E18 SSD controller, Kington’s KC3000 delivered a very responsive performance that proved it’s one of the best SSDs right now. Unlike Seagate and Corsair, Kingston has unleashed what seems to be the E18’s full potential in KC3000.