Kingston-KC3000
In 1987, Kingston entered the market with a single product and now they are one of the renowned brands in the storage industry market across the globe. They are catering to various industries of business to consumer products like Server memory, laptop internal and external drive, SSD drives, memory solution for gaming, USB Flash Drives, SD Cards, MicroSD cards, embed flash and DRAM Components and a lot more.
Kingston PR team has sent us the KC 3000 PCle 4.0 NVMe M.2 (1TB)- Part No – SKC3000S/1024G for review.
The Review
On the package of the Kingston KC 3000 PCle 4.0 NVMe M.2 it is mentioned read 7000MB/s and write 6000MB/s. The Random 4K read/write – up to 900,000/1,000,000 IOPS. The dimension of the device is 80mm x 22mm x 2.21mm and weighs 7grams.
Kingston KC 3000 PCle 4.0 NVMe M.2 is single-sided SSDs are more desirable than double-sided because they draw less power, are easier to cool, and can potentially fit where double-sided SSDs cannot. The 512GB and 1TB come single-sided while the larger capacities come with components on both sides of the PCB. It has Phison’s high-performance, 8-channel PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe 1.4 NVMe SSD controller, the PS5018-E18 lies at the heart of the Kingston KC3000. To attain its high endurance ratings, the KC3000 takes advantage of Phison’s fourth-generation Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) ECC and the company factory overprovisioned by 7.4%.
This not only aids with sustained write performance but also is implemented to aid with bad block management and other background NAND management routines. The controller is built on a 12nm process to keep a handle on the heat output while operating at 1 GHz. It features ASPM, ASPT, and supports the low-power L1.2 idle state to keep cool. It also thermal throttles if it is to exceed a temperature of 84 degrees Celsius based on its S.M.A.R.T. data. It leverages a triple-CPU primary architecture based on Arm Cortex R5 cores and offloads common, repetitive firmware code to a dual-CPU coprocessor, accelerating writes and queueing.
What is TBW?
TBW stands for Total Bytes Written on the drive. In simple terms, the no of times the data is written and erased on the drive or the life of the drive. SSD drives are chips that are on the board and not like the HDD which is rotating or moving disk.
This is also important as we are buying and investing in a product and we need to know the drive/SDD life. The Kingston KC 3000 PCle 4.0 NVMe M.2 comes with 5 years of warranty and can do 800 TBW, compared to other competitor brands.
As this review unit is a 1TB model, it can rewrite 800 times of its capacity or writing over 5 years. So in terms of usage, a user can fill the drive 43.8% drive daily which is 438GB data on 1TB Drive.
Test benchmark for the Kingston KC 3000
To test the Kingston KC 3000 PCle 4.0 NVMe M.2, I have reviewed with 3 variations.
Testing the Kingston KC 3000 with AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 12- Core Processor with baseboard ROG STRIX X570- E-gaming as a secondary drive.
This is an active editing desktop unit used for the 4K video production. The Kingston KC 3000 was directly inserted on the motherboard to test the read/ write speed. And we got pretty good results as mentioned on the packaging.
Testing the Kingston KC 3000 with ROG STRIX SCAR II gaming laptop which has Intel Core i7-8750H processor as the primary C drive
This is older gaming but still powerful for photo editing and video production. The laptop originally came with 256GB M.2 NVMe PCIe 3.0 SSD which was replaced with the Kingston KC 3000 PCle 4.0 NVMe M.2 and I could say there was quite a difference in speed and boot-up of the Windows 10 (Still not convinced about Windows 11 and waiting for the more updates and a stable version compatible with all my software)
The copying of data which included 4K movies, software, work files happened at great speed compared to the older 256GB M.2 NVMe PCIe 3.0 SSD.
Testing the Kingston KC 3000 as on the ROG STRIX SCAR II gaming laptop with external SSD with external casing.
This testing is not the ideal testing of the Kingston KC 3000 but in case the consumer wants to use the NVMe drive as an additional external drive or carry around their work projects in the drive or use it as IT tech guys would say Bootable drive with all the necessary software and files. The drive was used in the external casing which was connected with a USB TYPE-C connector to the ROG STRIX II gaming laptop.
Kingston KC 3000 for Upgrading your Gaming laptop which has a compatible NVMe M.2 slot.
There are a lot of designers, gamers and videographers who have purchased expensive gaming laptops in the past and sometimes it become tough for the users to invest again into new hardware and always lookout for new solutions or approach to continue the same device for a longer period of time.
Here is an example, I have a ROG STRIX SCAR II gaming laptop which has an Intel Core i7-8750H processor with 16GB RAM and for storage, it has got 256GB M.2 NVMe PCIe 3.0 SSD and secondary drive 1TB 5400RPM 2.5″ SATA HDD. The gaming laptop has a dedicated NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB GDDR5. The performance of the laptop is still great for my photo editing and video editing software.
As I have replaced the 256GB M.2 NVMe PCIe 3.0 SSD with the Kingston KC 3000 PCle 4.0 NVMe M.2. I found a great difference in the speed and boot-up of the laptop and also could see the difference in copying the files and more space in the C drive. The rendering time of the videos on the same laptop has been reduced by 40%. The preview of the active video with the transition before the renders are smooth.
My personal recommendation to consumers is to take a look at this option of upgrading their laptop if you have the budget constraints to invest in a new rig.
Conclusion
The benchmark result has proven that Kingston KC 3000 PCle 4.0 NVMe M.2 is a great product for the price. The most important factor
1) Single-sided drive which can be used in the laptop and desktop as some compact laptops and desktops may have issues to install with double-sided drive.
2) The drive some with 800TBW with 5 years Limited warranty with technical support.
3) The Low profile graphene aluminum heat spreader can be good, especially while using in laptop usage.
Price and availability
Kingston KC 3000 PCle 4.0 NVMe M.2 SKC3000S/1024G is available with various e-commerce websites.
Amazon.ae is selling for AED 670.48.
About The Author
1 thought on “Review of the Kingston KC 3000 PCle 4.0 NVMe M.2 (1TB) in the UAE”
Comments are closed.