At a glanceExpert's Rating
Pros
- Very fast real-world transfers
- Super affordable
Cons
- Parsimonious TBW rating
- Only 3-year warranty
- Slows to a crawl off cache
Our Verdict
If you’re looking for excellent performance without undue expenditure, then Kingston’s NV3 Gen 4 SSD is just what the doctor ordered.
Last year’s NV2 from Kingston delivered great bang-for-your-SSD-buck. This year’s NV3 is still wonderfully affordable, yet massively improved — even setting a record writing our 450GB single file. Who would’ve thought?
What are the Kingston NV3’s features?
The NV3 is a PCIe 4.0 x4 (four lane), M.2 NVMe SSD using a DRAM-less (Host Memory Buffer/HMB) design to cut down on costs. The controller is a Silicon Motion SM2268XG and the NAND is Kingston-labeled, stacked QLC. At least that’s my assumption given the performance off cache and TBW rating.
The actual type of NAND and the number of layers wasn’t specified by Kingston, and the company says that will vary from capacity to capacity.
Further reading: See our roundup of the best SSDs to learn about competing products.
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</div></figure></div>How much does the Kingston NV3 cost?
The NV3 is available in 500GB/$54, 1TB/$77, 2TB/$154 (tested) flavors. A 4TB version is in the works, but not as of yet priced.
While the NV3 is very inexpensive, it might just cost you some peace of mind. The drive is warrantied for only three years, rather than the usual five. Additionally, the TBW (terabytes that my be written) rating is a miserly 160TBW per TB of NAND — well below the 250TBW per TB of NAND that was our previous low.
That previous low was for a QLC drive, hence our speculation that this is what the NV3 employs. For whatever reason, vendor outlooks aren’t nearly as sunny on the longevity of QLC as they are on that of TLC. Still, 160TB is a lot of writing for the average user.
How fast is the Kingston NV3?
While the synthetic benchmark results were a touch below average for a HMB design, the NV3’s real-world results were slightly better. Not to mention, a huge improvement over its NV2 predecessor.
The Crucial P310 and Corsair M600 Elite shown in the charts are both similarly performing 2TB PCIe 4.0 host memory buffer designs, though the former is a small form-factor 2230 (22mm wide, 30mm long).
While not rated the fastest of the three drives, the NV3’s CrystalDiskMark 8 sequential transfer performance is still quite good.
<div class="lightbox-image-container foundry-lightbox"><div class="extendedBlock-wrapper block-coreImage undefined"><figure class="wp-block-image size-large enlarged-image"><img decoding="async" data-wp-bind--src="selectors.core.image.enlargedImgSrc" data-wp-style--object-fit="selectors.core.image.lightboxObjectFit" src="" alt="" class="wp-image-2427579" width="1200" height="574" loading="lazy" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">While not rated the fastest of the three drives, the NV3’s CrystalDiskMark 8 sequential transfer performance is still good for PCIe 4.0.</figcaption></figure></div> </div></figure></div>The NV3 also did amazingly well in random operations, though HMB SSDs are not on on par with DRAM designs in this regard.
<div class="lightbox-image-container foundry-lightbox"><div class="extendedBlock-wrapper block-coreImage undefined"><figure class="wp-block-image size-large enlarged-image"><img decoding="async" data-wp-bind--src="selectors.core.image.enlargedImgSrc" data-wp-style--object-fit="selectors.core.image.lightboxObjectFit" src="" alt="" class="wp-image-2427580" width="1200" height="574" loading="lazy" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">The NV3 also did amazingly well in random operations, though not on on par with DRAM designs.</figcaption></figure></div> </div></figure></div>While the NV3 was fast in our 48GB transfers, it didn’t set any records.
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