Kingston Sneaks Affordable NV3 SSD With Impressive Speeds Into Storage Lineup
Kids these days are too young to remember when solid state drive (SSD) storage cost an arm and a leg, essentially making it a luxury purchase for power users while everyone else was still saddled with a mechanical hard disk drive (HDD). Times have certainly changed since then with SSD prices having come way down. Driving that point home is a new SSD line by Kingston that apparently didn't even warrant a press release.
A lack of fanfare is something that is usually reserved for an underwhelming product. Kingston's new NV3 SSD series, however, is only underwhelming in the sense that the market is absolutely flooded with SSD storage options at a every budget and various speed tiers. The NV3 falls into affordable territory while taking decent advantage of the PCI Express 4.0 bus.
There are three capacities on tap, including 500GB, 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB. As is often the case, the more capacious models offer the fastest performance. In this instance, the 4TB and 2TB models serve up sequential reads of up to 6,000MB/s and sequential writes of up to 5,000MBs. The 1TB model, meanwhile, is rated to hit the same sequential read speed while topping out at 4,000MB/s for sequential writes. Finally, the 500GB model is rated to hit 5,000MB/s and 3,000MB/s for sequential reads and writes, respectively.
Kingston is less forthcoming with 4K random read and write speed claims, which are the more important metrics for tasks like gaming. Nevertheless, the sequential speeds are certainly respectable, just not class-leading (and of course well below the fastest PCIe 5.0 models).
There's also a lack of details regarding the type of NAND flash memory chips and memory controller. That said, Kingston at least provide endurance ratings—160 TBW for the 500GB model, 320 TBW for 1TB, 640 TBW for 2TB, and 1,280 TBW for 4TB.
Here's how street pricing breaks down on Amazon...
The 4TB model is not yet listed (that we can find, anyway). For the above capacities, it works out to around $0.08 per gigabyte for the 2TB and 1TB models, and close to $0.11 for the 500GB drive. Those are pretty decent for the speeds on tap, though again, it's a highly competitive landscape. For example, you can find a 2TB WD_Black SN850X with speeds of up to 7,300MB/s for $159.99 on Amazon, and slightly slower drives like a 2TB Crucial P3 Plus (up to 5,000MB/s) selling for $112.09.
Even so, these are good starting prices for Kingston's drives, and we suspect we'll see sale pricing at some point, as tends to happen often in the SSD space.
