NVMe SSDs are very common nowadays and there are many choices available in the market. One of the reputable brands that releases some of the best budget-friendly high-speed SSDs is Kingston. The latest Kingston NV3 SSD continues that trajectory – but is it worth your money?
The packaging for the Kingston NV3 is pretty simple – maybe a tad bit too big for that SSD. It’s a PCIe Gen 4 M.2 2280 SSD and it can go up to 6000MB/s, as stated on the box.
Our particular unit here is the 2TB variant – and this is important as SSD speeds scale according to the number of NAND chips on the SSD. We’ll get back to this later.
Looking at the back of the packaging, we can see that it says “free technical support” and we can take advantage of that by going through Kingston’s own website.
By the way, every purchase of the Kingston NV3 also comes with a special version of Acronis True Image for Kingston. This utility can help you clone your existing drive into your new SSD without performing a total reinstallation of Windows.
Now, the SSD itself was actually shown to us at Computex 2024 with the codename Kenting Bay. It has a blue PCB and this 2TB variant has two 1TB QLC NAND chips, with the part number FP01T08UCT1-6B. There is nothing at the back of the SSD.
As for the controller, it uses the Silicon Motion SM2268XT2G-AA. This is also a DRAM-less SSD.
Now, does this SSD live up to the “up to 6000MB/s” claim in speed? Actually, it does. The SSD can easily reach up to 2TB in CrystalDiskMark and lives up to “up to 6000MB/s” regarding the achievable read speed. The write speed isn’t that far behind – which is impressive.
When we did the AIDA64 linear write torture test on the Kingston NV3, we can see that once the buffer is full, the SSD couldn’t recover back to its maximum write speed – and that is to be expected from a DRAM-less SSD. Nonetheless, this is a torture test. We’re not going to hit this limit unless we’re transferring many large files all at once.
Should you buy the Kingston NV3?
For the price, they do vary from shop to shop but I’m taking this as my reference. Here they are:
- 500GB @ RM219
- 1TB @ RM329
- 2TB @ RM625
For SSDs in particular, I also like to do the gigabyte/price calculation as that truly unveils the best bang-for-your-buck option.
- 500GB @ RM0.438/gigabyte
- 1TB @ RM0.329/gigabyte
- 2TB @ RM0.3125/gigabyte
Surprisingly, the 2TB is offering the best value out of all capacities available. Even though you might think having 2TB is excessive, I disagree as we can never have too much storage. Maybe that’s the data hogger in me speaking – but that’s what I believe in.
The Kingston NV3 also comes with a limited 3-year warranty with free technical support alongside the free copy of Acronis True Image for Kingston – so feel free to take advantage of these benefits.
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