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

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Although the 5,677MB/s peak read throughput figure we saw from the drive is short of the official 7,000MB/s official maximum figure, it's still good enough to put the drive into the top spot in the results chart. Enter the Kingston KC3000, a wallet-friendly model available in 512GB, 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB configurations with no compromises to the performance. Full capacities available from 512GB to 4096GB to meet your data storage requirements. PCIe 4.0 NVMe technology.

We used CrystalDiskMark 8‘s custom settings to test the 4K random read performance of the drive through a range of queue depths. The setup for the tests is listed below. The KC3000 is the newest premium drive offering from Kingston available in capacities of 512GB, 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB, all of which use the Gen4 interface. Its graphene aluminum heat spreader also helps to effectively disperse heat while keeping the drive cool during intense usage, making it a great choice for hardware enthusiasts and prosumers looking. A caveat here is that the smaller capacities of 512GB and 1TB are limited to 3,900 MB/s write and 6,000 MB/s write respectively which is on the slower end of things. Because of this, I would recommend opting for a 2TB variant or above, such as with this review unit. What every unit has in common, however, is the Micron 176L TLC flash memory, which even several years after release has yet to be beaten in performance or value. For the long term performance stability test, we set the drive up to run a 20-minute 4K random test with a 30% write, 70% read split, at a Queue Depth of 256 over the entire disk. The 2TB Kingston KC3000 averaged 81,845 IOPS for the test with a performance stability of 70%. 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.To get a measure of how much faster PCIe NVMe drives are than standard SATA SSDs we use the same files but transfer to and from a 2TB Kioxia Exceria Plus drive: 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. The PCMark 10 Full System Drive Benchmark uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and common tasks to fully test the performance of the fastest modern drives. The benchmark is designed to measure the performance of fast system drives using the SATA bus at the low end and devices connected via PCI Express at the high end. A negyedik generációs KC3000 7000/7000 MB/s (olvasás/írás) maximális sebességgel nyújt villámgyors teljesítményt, 4096 GB-os teljes kapacitása* pedig optimális adattárolást tesz lehetővé. A rendszer tárolókapacitását bővítő felhasználók így lépést tarthatnak a nagy teljesítményigényű feladatokkal, és jobb teljesítményt érhetnek el az olyan szoftveralkalmazásoknál, mint a 3D rendering vagy a 4K+ tartalomkészítés. A KC3000 nagy teljesítménysűrűségű 3D TLC NAND memóriatechnológiával dolgozik, szabványos M.2 2280 kialakítású házban. Így még több adat tárolására képes, és biztosítja a felhasználók számára a PCIe 4.0 sebesség előnyeit. A KC3000 meghajtót alacsony profilú grafén-alumínium hűtőborda erősíti, amely hatékonyan elvezeti a hőt és nagy terhelés alatt is alacsonyan tartja az SSD hőmérsékletét.

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.

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The SANDRA file system benchmark didn't seem to play well with the Kingston KC3000. We were expecting performance similar to the Phison E18 reference drive, but the Kingston drive's read result consistently trailed the Phison E18 and Innogrit-based drives. It had no trouble outrunning the Samsung drive, though.

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. This SSD is designed for use in desktop and notebook computer workloads and is not intended for Server environments. The Renegade Fury measured 27C at idle and hit above 75C with sustained writes. The drive exhibited some throttling after about 1TB of writes, which is a large amount. The drive’s performance scaled neatly with temperature and the addition of airflow helped keep it from throttling. It’s possible Kingston designed this drive to perform within a tighter thermal envelope to maintain reliability. https://www.tomshardware.com/features/upgrading-your-laptop-with-pcie-40-storage-which-ssd-is-the-bestSwitching over to the Peak Performance test profile we see the drive in second place in the results chart behind Patriot's Viper VP4300 drive with its read score of 7,384MB/s. When it comes to the 4K QD32 T16 test, the KC3000 sits in the top position with a read result of 668,752 IOPS with writes at 548,450 IOPS. 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. Having scored roughly 400 read IOPs above Samsung’s 980 Pro at a QD of 1, the KC3000 delivered the fastest random performance of any NAND-based SSD we have touched, not to mention, its maximal random write performance hit nearly 1.6 million IOPS. Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery 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. While the flash interface speed played a big part in its victories, they were also achieved due in part to a larger dynamic SLC cache than compared to the Seagate and Corsair. Although the trade-off is a slower empty-to-fill time, the KC3000 is still tuned well for most gamers, prosumers, and storage enthusiasts.

The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage. To test real life performance of a drive we use a mix of folder/file types and by using the FastCopy utility (which gives a time as well as MB/s result) we record the performance of drive reading from & writing to a 256GB Samsung SSD850 PRO. At QD1 the Kingston KC3000 produced a single thread random read result of 20,507 IOPS (83.998MB/s), using two threads saw the performance rise to 41,694 IOP (170.78MB/s). Using three threads produced 61,227 IOPS (250.78MB/s) and with four threads the performance rose to 79,974 IOPS (327.57MB/s). The drive’s performance increases smoothly as the queue depth deepens for each thread count. AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read and write tests, as well as random read and write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive. AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures.

The Kingston KC3000 is the company’s latest premium SSD offering available in the industry-standard M.2 2280 form factor and in capacities from 512GB to 4TB. Specifically designed for enthusiasts and power users looking to get the most out of the new NVMe Gen4 interface, Kingston indicates that the KC3000 is best suited for 3D rendering and 4K+ content creation software applications. 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 Jumping into the formal benchmark suite, it’s not a trivial task to separate this Phison E18-based protagonist from the similarly-equipped competition. Peak sequential speeds are awash in ATTO, for instance, certain if you compare like-for-like with 2TB models. The Kingston Fury Renegade does carve out a bit of a niche in CrystalDiskMark. But can you really tell the difference, in the real world, between 7,000MB/s and 7,300MB/s? Probably not.