We put the KC3000 through our usual suite of internal solid-state drive benchmarks, comprising Crystal DiskMark 6.0, PCMark 10 Storage, and AS-SSD. Crystal DiskMark's sequential speed tests provide a traditional measure of drive throughput, simulating best-case, straight-line transfers of large files. Based on “out-of-box performance” using a PCIe 4.0 motherboard. Speed may vary due to host hardware, software and usage. VDI FC Initial Login saw all the drives with unstable results. That said, the KC3000 topped out at roughly 70K IOPS at 426.4 µs in latency before taking a severe spike in performance to end the test.

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. Next, we switched over to our VDI full clone test. For our boot profile, the Kingston KC3000 SSD peaked at 129,099 IOPS at a latency of 261.5µs. This was good enough for second place, though well behind the first place WD SN850. The Kingston KC3000 wants to be in the conversation with Gen4 SSD leaders like the Samsung 980 Pro, WD SN850, and FireCuda 530. The KC3000 certainly showed that it can compete at that level, as it outpaced the popular Samsung drive in virtually all of our tests, especially its bar-setting setting transfer speeds in sequential reads. All of this combined makes the KC3000 an impressive release from Kingston, and a drive we highly recommend for enthusiasts and content creators.VDI FC Monday Login told a similar story, as the Kingston drive topped out at 25,768 IOPS at 193.1µs before ending at 21,337 IOPS (747µs). The on test that still sets the FireCuda 530 apart from the rest is the 450GB sustained write. The KC3000’s time is nothing to sneeze at however. Shorter bars are better.

For highlights, the KC3000 was able to hit peak scores of 585,182 IOPS in 4K read, 445,331 IOPS in 4K write, 6.62GB/s in 64K read, and 1.69GB/s in 64K write. In our VDI Full Clone tests, the Kingston topped out at 129,099 IOPS in boot, while Initial Login and Monday Login showed peaks of 70,000 IOPS and 21,337 IOPS. Compact M.2 design fits easily into small-form-factor (SFF) systems, desktops and laptop PCs. Low-profile graphene aluminium heat spreader. We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre storage. Looking at SQL Server average latency, the new Kingston drive showed a solid average latency of 3ms, which placed it at the upper part of the leaderboard and alongside Samsung’s flagship SSD, the Samsung 980 Pro. Our 1TB KC3000 sample absorbed 369GB of data at a rate of 6,050 MBps before degrading to roughly 1,015 MBps for the remainder of the test. Unfortunately, the KC3000 did not recover any of its SLC cache during the idle recovery rounds, but its write speed measured roughly 1.9 GBps instead of 1 GBps. Power Consumption and TemperatureThere doesn't seem to be too many PCIe 4.0 drives with a 4TB option, so that's a welcome change here for anyone who wants to go all out with storage space. The 1TB model I'm testing has an 800 Terabytes Written (TBW) durability rating, and all models come with a five-year warranty. If you're using the drive every day over the course of that warranty period, you'd have to be writing more than 430GB of data per day to theoretically exhaust the SSD. Some of the listed capacity on a Flash storage device is used for formatting and other functions and thus is not available for data storage. As such, the actual available capacity for data storage is less than what is listed on the products. For more information, go to Kingston's Flash Memory Guide. SSD ini didesain untuk penggunaan beban kerja komputer di desktop dan notebook, tidak dimaksudkan untuk lingkungan Server. Sebagian kapasitas yang tercantum pada perangkat penyimpanan Flash digunakan untuk pemformatan dan fungsi lainnya sehingga tidak tersedia untuk penyimpanan data. Dengan demikian, kapasitas sebenarnya yang tersedia untuk penyimpanan data akan kurang dari yang tercantum pada produk. Untuk informasi lebih lanjut, baca Panduan Memori Flash Kingston.

Kingston includes a key for Acronis True Image HD cloning software to make the transition from your old drive to the KC3000 just a bit easier. You also have access to Kingston's SSD Manager software so you can monitor drive health, status reports, secure data deletion, and more. These are optional features; the drive can be physically installed and initialized through Windows in just a few minutes without any extra software required. Write performance will decrease as the drive fills up. In some rare cases, components may change for the worse. Kingston has been accused of substituting slower parts before. If your drive, given similar hardware, does not perform as well as our test unit, please let us know. Conclusion Full capacities available from 512GB to 4096GB to meet your data storage requirements. PCIe 4.0 NVMe technology. This test uses SQL Server 2014 running on Windows Server 2012 R2 guest VMs and is stressed by Quest’s Benchmark Factory for Databases. StorageReview’s Microsoft SQL Server OLTP testing protocol employs the current draft of the Transaction Processing Performance Council’s Benchmark C (TPC-C), an online transaction-processing benchmark that simulates the activities found in complex application environments.Berdasarkan “performa aktual” menggunakan motherboard PCIe 4.0. Kecepatan dapat bervariasi tergantung perangkat keras, perangkat lunak, dan penggunaan. 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.

Recording a 1080p gameplay video at 60 FPS with OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) while playing Overwatch.

Testing the Kingston KC3000: Fast, and Good at Everyday Storage Tasks

Switching over to sequential workloads, the new Kingston drive performed much better than all the other tested drives peaking at 105,888 IOPS (6.62GB/s) and 301µs latency. Though this didn’t quite make it to its top quoted numbers, it is still one of the fastest consumer drives we’ve seen in sequential reads. 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. This SSD is designed for use in desktop and notebook computer workloads and is not intended for Server environments.