Page 2 - A Closer Look, Test System
The Kingston NV3 2TB is primed for the wallet-friendly market, so it is no surprise that the physical appearance is quite typical and like other solid state drives. The label does indicate a few things, including its name and capacity. It also states this was made in Taiwan. Physically speaking, this is an M.2 2280 SSD. The "2280" standard refers to its physical size of 22mm by 80mm. The components are located on one side of the printed circuit board, which we will take a glance at shortly. The Kingston NV3 2TB is PlayStation 5-compatible, since the total thickness is below 11.25mm.
The Kingston NV3 2TB works on the NVMe 1.4 logical device interface and plugs into compatible motherboards directly. Electrically, this M.2 NVMe drive interfaces with PCIe 4.0. The NV3 2TB uses up to four lanes for a theoretical maximum of 8000MB/s bandwidth in each direction. Its specified weight is 7g. On the other side, there are absolutely no components or label of interest, as it is just the exposed backside of the printed circuit board.
Underneath the label, you can get a better glimpse of the primary components of the Kingston NV3 2TB. Just to note, you probably do not want to go removing the label, as Kingston says this will void the warranty. However, the first thing we can see is the smaller chip, which is the Silicon Motion SM2268XT2. This is an NVMe solution on the M.2 socket that uses the PCIe 4.0 standard. It is built on the 12nm process with a 32-bit ARM Cortex R8 dual-core processor. Based on the "XT" notation in the controller’s name, you know the memory for the controller is located within the controller, and there is no extra memory chip on the SSD. This is a bit of a disadvantage to having no DRAM, as this can affect prolonged read and write performance. To alleviate this, some SSDs without DRAM may utilize HMB, or host memory buffer, and allocate some of the system's memory as a buffer location for faster access compared to flash NAND access. This is the case with the Kingston NV3 2TB.
The NV3 2TB's flash memory is two NAND chips labeled as Kingston FP01T08UCT1-6B. These are rebranded Kioxia BiCS6, which are 162-layer quad-level cell chips. Each NAND flash has 8192Tb or 1TB for a total of 2TB together. Its rated write endurance is 640TBW, which is quite low for a 2TB drive. For example, the Netac NV7000-Q 1TB has the same write endurance with half the capacity. This works out to just over 350GB per day for five years. Traditionally, QLC-based SSDs have a shorter write endurance, and this is the case with the NV3 2TB. Internally, 48GB out of the 2048GB total capacity -- just under 3% -- is provisioned for the drive controller for overhead, so the actual usable space is 2TB, as advertised. In Windows, you will see 1863GB available. The rated power consumption was not provided.
To see how all this hardware translates to numbers in our benchmarks, we will pit the NV3 2TB against other SSDs from manufacturers like ADATA, Corsair, Crucial, Kingston, Netac, Patriot, and Western Digital in the next seven pages or so.
Our test configuration is as follows:
CPU: Intel Core i5-12600K
CPU Cooling: be quiet! Dark Rock Elite
Motherboard: ASUS ProArt Z690-Creator WiFi
RAM: Crucial Pro Overclocking DDR5-6000 2x16GB
Graphics: EVGA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti XC3 ULTRA GAMING
Chassis: Thermaltake Core P3 TG Pro Snow
Storage: XPG Atom 30 1TB
Power: FSP Hydro PTM Pro 1200W
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 11 Pro
Compared Hardware:
- Kingston NV3 2TB
- ADATA Legend 960 1TB
- Corsair MP600 Core XT 2TB
- Corsair MP600 Elite 2TB
- Crucial P310 2230 2TB
- Crucial P310 2280 1TB
- Crucial P3 Plus 1TB
- Crucial P3 Plus 4TB
- Crucial P5 Plus 1TB
- Crucial P5 Plus 2TB (Heatsink Version)
- Crucial T500 2TB
- Kingston FURY Renegade 1TB
- Kingston KC3000 1TB
- Lexar NM710 1TB
- Lexar PLAY 1TB
- Lexar Professional NM800 PRO 2TB
- Netac NV7000-Q 1TB
- Netac NV7000-t 1TB
- Patriot P400 1TB
- Western Digital WD_BLACK SN770M 2TB
- Western Digital WD_BLACK SN770 NVMe SSD 1TB
- Western Digital WD_BLACK SN850 NVMe SSD 1TB
- XPG Atom 50 1TB
- XPG Gammix S70 Blade 1TB
Page Index
1. Introduction, Packaging, Specifications
2. A Closer Look, Test System
3. Benchmark: AIDA64 Disk Benchmark
4. Benchmark: ATTO Disk Benchmark
5. Benchmark: Crystal Disk Mark 8.0
6. Benchmark: HD Tune Pro 5.70
7. Benchmark: PassMark PerformanceTest 10
8. Benchmark: PCMark 10
9. Benchmark: 3DMark
10. Conclusion
