Kingston Releases SSDNow KC1000 M.2 NVMe SSDs

Over the past couple of years, the SSD industry has been undergoing a transition away from SATA to NVMe. In addition to changing the storage interface protocol, the industry is also changing the form factor to better suits SSDs. Kingston along with other makers are ditching the old 2.5″ form factor in favour of the slimmer and more flexible M.2 form factor. The company is now releasing their new SSDNow KC1000 line of M.2 NVMe SSDs.

The new SSDNow KC1000 lineup uses what may become the industry standard M.2-2280 form-factor. Ditching PCIe 2.0, the KC1000 features the faster PCIe 3.0 x4 lane interface used in newer drives. Furthermore, Kingston is targeting the drive at performance users with the recently debuted Phison PS5007-E7 controller. As a result of also using MLC NAND, the KC1000 should offer up some decent performance. As a result of the form factor and use of MLC, the drive capacities peak out at 960GB, with 480 GB and 240 GB offerings as well.

Due to a relatively speedy specification combination, the drives offer speeds well in excess of SATA drives. All three capacities manage 2,700 MB/s reads and while the larger drives can reach 1,700 MB/s writes, the 240GB hits just 900 MB/s. 4K random read IOPS hit 290,000 for the larger capacities while the smallest drive manages just 250,000. 4K random write speeds are consistent across the board at 190,000 IOPS. Kingston is backing up the drives with a relatively lengthy 5 year warranty. The drives can be bought standalone or along with a PCIe 3.0 x4 to M.2 adapter card.