The Kingston KC3000 1TB SSD stands out from the previous model reviewed, the Kingston NV3, just as a mid-range model should differ from a budget one. It’s fast, cool, stable, and, like all Kingston internal drives, comes bundled with Acronis software. However, considering how impressive the NV3 was, I was curious myself to see if the KC3000 would justify its higher price.
Video review of Kingston KC3000 1TB
Market position and price
The good news is that the price increase isn’t significant. The Kingston KC3000 1TB costs, on average, around $100 or €90. For comparison, the NV3 is roughly $25 cheaper. Additionally, the KC3000 is available in both larger and smaller capacities, ranging from 512GB to 4TB, with the 4TB option priced at over $300.
Package contents
The 1TB drive package includes just the SSD itself—no surprises there. Additional software, such as Acronis True Image for Kingston and Kingston SSD Manager, is available for download separately once the drive is connected.
It’s cool because Acronis costs a lot of money, but if you have the Internet, you can quickly clone your system to a new drive, for example. And yes, it’s a full-fledged version, although it’s not lifetime, but only for one year.
Exterior
The KC3000 itself certainly looks more refined than its budget counterpart. Notably, it features a graphene-coated heat spreader, which, spoiler alert, significantly reduced temperatures during higher speeds.
And thermoplastic is the perfect solution for any drive faster than PCIe 3. They conduct heat perfectly and don’t interfere with radiators.
Specifications
Underneath the heat spreader, there’s quite a dense array of chips. Starting with the PS5018-E18, or Phison E18—one of the top PCIe 4×4 controllers. It maximizes the communication channel’s bandwidth, allowing speeds up to 7400 MB/s. While the KC3000 promises slightly lower speeds, this difference isn’t critical.
It’s worth noting that the E18, like the KC3000 itself, isn’t new—it’s almost four years old. However, given that it was once considered flagship, it still has plenty of advantages. Manufactured by TSMC using a 12-nanometer process, it features Phison’s proprietary CoXProcessor 2.0 architecture, with three ARM Cortex-R5 cores, support for 8-channel NAND, and SHA encryption up to 512 bits.
Additionally, there are DDR4 chips on board, though not for cache. On our drive, this is implemented with two Nanya NT5AD256M16E4-JR chips, each with a 4GB capacity and a frequency of 1600 MT/s. The KC3000 achieves its 1TB capacity thanks to Kingston’s proprietary FP51208UCT1-CO memory chips. While official data on these chips is unavailable, there is some related information: the memory here is 176-layer TLC with an SLC buffer. You’ll be able to gauge the capacity yourself during testing.
These chips combine to provide the Kingston KC3000 1TB model with sequential speeds of up to 7 GB/s for reading and 6 GB/s for writing, with up to 1,000,000 IOPS for random performance. The endurance rating is 800 TBW, with a mean time to failure of 200,000 hours. The drive comes with a 5-year warranty and an operating temperature range from -40°C to +85°C. As we’ll see later, temperature management won’t be an issue at all.
In theory, there are a couple of potential drawbacks: the lack of AES 256 encryption support and, surprisingly, power consumption. The Phison E18 controller turned out to be unexpectedly power-hungry, with the 4 TB version of the KC3000 consuming up to 10 W under load. The 1 TB version consumes up to 6 W, which is relatively standard. However, if you’re using an energy-efficient laptop like the ASUS ZenBook S 14, it’s something to keep in mind. Incidentally, we already have a review of that laptop.
Testing
For the testing setup in this review, I used the same configuration as for the NV3 review: an AMD Ryzen 5 7600 processor on the ASUS ROG Strix B650E-E Gaming Wi-Fi motherboard. The power supply is a be quiet! Straight Power 12 1200W, with cooling provided by the Zalman Reserator 5 Z36. The graphics card is the ASUS Dual EVO RTX 4060, all housed in a custom-made Ukrainian case, Gorilla Custom X.
As always, the SSD was installed in a motherboard slot that supports PCIe 5, ensuring that there are no bottlenecks. Additionally, the SSD was tested under the stock heatsink that comes with the motherboard, which weighs over 50 g. I do not conduct tests without such a heatsink because I do not recommend using PCIe 4.0 SSDs without cooling—these drives tend to run too hot for safe operation.
The speeds are now on your screens. The promised 7 GB/s from the KC3000 is easily achieved, and the SLC caching provides quite stable performance in both sequential and random tests. However, when I say “stable,” I don’t mean a perfectly flat graph. Nonetheless, it’s significantly more pleasant compared to the NV3, which showed a noticeable drop-off in performance.
In the KC3000, during the random write test, there’s a similar phenomenon, but it occurs after 50% of the capacity, meaning after 500 GB. Instead of a drop in performance, there are fluctuations ranging from 300 to 1600 MB/s. After half an hour of testing, the drive heated up to 55°C, which is lower than the NV3, I remind you, under the same heatsink.
Conclusions
In a way, this model represents the ideal of the mid-range segment. It could once have been a flagship, but those days are gone. However, even now, amidst PCIe 5 and models where the performance graph is almost perfectly flat everywhere, the KC3000 strikes the right balance.
Clearly better than the NV3, but not on par with flagship models, and the price reflects that. Is it worth paying extra for this model? That’s up to you to decide. Particularly, if you need a 4TB drive, you won’t have many options from Kingston at that price point. Therefore, yes, I recommend the Kingston KC3000 1TB.
- Kingston NV3 SSD Review: A Claim to Perfection?
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Where to buy