INTRODUCTION

   We may be just months away from seeing the very first PCIe 5.0 (Gen 5) M.2 NVMe SSDs make their debut in the market (with theoretical speeds that could reach 15000MB/s) but for now PCIe 4.0 (Gen 4) models are clearly the fastest consumer oriented storage media around. With a range of models with read and write speeds starting from around 4000MB/s and climbing all the way up to 7000MB/s (and slightly above that in some rare cases) these SSD models are at least 30-35 times fastest than the fastest consumer oriented mechanical drives out in the market today. Of course, there aren't that many M.2 NVMe SSDs in the market that can go all the way up to 7000MB/s and this is exactly what Kingston aims at with their brand new KC3000 and Fury models the former of which I’ll be testing today.

   Kingston Technology Company, Inc. is the world’s largest independent manufacturer of memory products. Kingston designs, manufactures and distributes memory products for desktops, laptops, servers, printers, and Flash memory products for PDAs, mobile phones, digital cameras, and MP3 players. Through its global network of subsidiaries and affiliates, Kingston has manufacturing facilities in California, Taiwan, China and sales representatives in the United States, Europe, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, Australia, India, Taiwan, China, and Latin America. For more information, please call +44 (0)1932 738888 or visit www.kingston.com

   The Kingston KC3000 M.2 NVMe PCIe 4.0 model is currently available in 512/1024/2048/4096GB capacities and just like the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus line it's also based on the latest 8-channel tri-core (32-bit ARM Cortex R5 CPUs) PS5018-E18 NVMe v1.4 compatible NAND flash controller by PHISON. This time over however the E18 NAND flash controller is paired with Micron’s brand new 512Gb 176-layer 3D TLC NAND flash together with 1600MHz DDR4 SDRAM (2GB for the 2TB model i have here with me). As for the PS5018-E18 NAND flash controller it features PHISON's 4th Gen LDPC engine (low-density parity check) along with end-to-end data path protection, wear levelling, thermal throttling (70 degrees Celsius limit), TRIM, bad block management, dynamic range SLC cache and SmartECC (RAID ECC). Finally, Kingston covers the entire KC3000 line with a 5-year limited warranty and as for endurance numbers it reports 400TBW for the 512GB model, 800TBW for the 1TB model, 1600TBW for the 2TB model and 3200TBW for the 4TB model (MTBF of 1.8 million hours applies for all).