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It seems we are always looking for the best in SSDs, whether it be performance or capacity. Reviewers are always more than happy to sing in praise of high end SSDs and so it should be; they represent just how far we have come in flash storage. Often overlooked, however, are those users don’t have high end needs for their use. They are just the every day typical PC users and many that still, even today, rely on hard drives that have been powering their systems for far too many years now. These users truly don’t need the biggest and baddest and they just want a reliable SSD to move over to that meets their storage and performance needs.
Truth be told, most people just how truly fast an SSD is capable of as its access time is so much faster than a hard drive. Their is a very obvious difference in just about every aspect of a SSD-based PC compared to a hard drive based system. I have always described it as the system knowing what key you are about to press, or command you are about to execute, even before you press return on your keyboard. It is almost instantaneous. This is where the newest Kingston NV3 Gen 4 SSD comes in. It is a great value based SSD with great capacities and speeds…with a decent warranty right their for support.
The Kingston NV3 is a PCIe 4.0 (Gen 4) 4-lane (x4) M.2 2280 (22mm wide x 80mm long) SSD that resembles the size and weight of a stick of gum. It relies on the NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) 1.4 protocol and, in laments terms, it provides for data movement via PCIe lanes rather than SATA lanes used by hard drive SSDs. This means things happen much faster. Performance for our sample 2TB NV3 SSD is listed at 6000MB/s read and 5000MB/s write which drops just a bit to 6000MB/s read and 4000MB/s write for the 1TB version.
Our Kingston NV3 2TB sample is a one-sided DRAMless SSD that is powered by the SMI SM2268XT2 NCMe 4-channel DRAMless SSD controller and contains two 1TB chips of Kingston-branded memory that is actually KIOXIA BiCS6 162-layer 3D QLC NAND flash. Remember when we stated this SSD was DRAMless? This means that there is no DRAM (dynamic random access memory) buffer chip that is common on SSDS. In this instance, Windows 9 and 10 provides the ability for this SSD to use system memory in place of the DRAM through the Host Memory Buffer and PCIe lane travel.
One of the common downfalls of progress with SSDs has been that the faster they become, the more heat they generate. Many PCIe 4/5 SSDS require heatsinks simply because of the speed in which they move data. The Kingston NV3 does not require a heatsink and we completed all of our testing without. There are a few reasons for this. The fact that technology provides for smaller low power SSD controllers and larger storage on a single RAM chip has brought us well away from power-hungry SSDs that have 4-chips on each side. Becoming much more common today are DRAMless SSDs such as the NV3 which contain only the controller and two RAM chips. The fact is that you still aren’t getting some of those top performing SSDs into an ultrabook is simply because of the heat concern. Similarly for gamers, SSD manufacturers identified the need to create PS5 compatible heatsinks for such use. Imagine… an SSD today is capable of containing 200 PS5 games on a single ‘gumstick size’ SSD.
Checking Amazon, we find pricing at $64.99 (1TB), $124.99 (2TB) and $289.99 for the 4TB size. The Kingston NV3 comes with a limited 3-year warranty, along with 320TBW (1TB), 640TBW (2TB) and 1280TBW (terabytes written) for the 4TB version.