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Kingston Officially Introduces A1000 NVMe SSD

Kingston had their new A1000 NVMe SSD with them to CES earlier this year where we had a first look at it. Now, the drive is finalised and its officially introduced as part of their lineup. The Kingston A1000 isn’t just a new drive; it’s the first entry-level consumer-grade PCIe NVMe SSD from Kingston utilising 3D NAND.

“Kingston is excited to release its newest SSD for the entry-level PCIe NVMe market. Designed with 3D NAND Flash memory, A1000 is more reliable and durable than a hard drive and doubles the performance of a SATA SSD. Now we can give consumers the benefit of PCIe performance at about the same price as SATA,” said Tony Hollingsbee, SSD Business Manager for EMEA at Kingston. “Consumers can replace a hard drive or slower SSD with A1000 and have the storage needed for applications, videos, photos and more.”

The Kingston A1000 Hardware

The Kingston A1000 is a PCIe NVMe drive with a Gen 3.0 x2 interface. At the heart of the drive is a 4-channel Phison 5008 controller. The controller is then paired with 3D NAND flash which allows large capacities at a low cost.

With up to 960GB capacity, it promises double the performance of SATA SSDs. In figures, that is a sequential read performance up to 1500MB/s and 1000MB/s when writing. That’s not bad at all for an entry-level category drive. You also get a low latency which equals fast responsiveness.

The random performance of the A1000 is rated up to 120K IOPS reading and 100K IOPS writing.

What about Other Capacities?

So there is a 960GB version which is great, but what about other capacity options. We all want 1TB or bigger drives, I’m sure of that, but it isn’t all of us who can afford that. Kingston knows this, of course, so they made some smaller versions too. Besides the 960GB version, there is a 480Gb and a 240GB version too.

A smaller capacity also means slightly lower performance. But it isn’t a whole lot less. Each step down in capacity will cost the A1000 100MB/s in write performance. That means 900MB/s for the 480GB and 800MB/s for the 240GB drive. The read performance stays at 1500MB/s.

The random performance also takes a small hit from the smaller capacities. The write performance drops to 90K and 80K respectively. The read performance for both the 480GB and 240GB also drops a little to 100K IOPS.

Perfect for SFF and Notebooks

The new A1000 is perfect for small form factor systems. Whether those are compact NUC-type systems or laptops. The single-sided M.2 2280 form factor makes A1000 ideal for notebooks and systems with limited space.

Endurance and Warranty

Both the endurance and warranty are important aspects of a storage drive. As with other Kingston drives, you get a great 5-year warranty with Kingston technical support. As for the endurance, here the A1000 is rated for a 1 million hours MTBF and 150TB TBW per 240GB capacity.