Introduction

With revenue in the multi-billion dollars, Kingston is the largest DRAM and flash memory products vendor in the world. While their strongest suit is memory modules and USB/flash card storage, they are also a major player in the SSD market, having released famous products such as the KC2000 and KC2500.



Today, we have the Kingston KC3000 for review. This latest high-end SSD comes to market roughly a year after the Kingston KC2500 we reviewed in December 2020. While the KC2500 and KC2000 were targeted at the PCI-Express 3.0 interface, using Silicon Motion's SM2262ENG controller, the new Kingston KC3000 is based on Phison's new E18 controller, which supports PCI-Express 4.0. Kingston has also taken the latest and greatest NAND flash from Micron, the famous 176-layer B47R, and includes 2 GB of DRAM for the mapping tables of the SSD.

The Kingston KC3000 comes in capacities of 512 GB ($135), 1 TB ($290), 2 TB ($450), and 4 TB ($1200). Endurance for these models is set to 400 TBW, 800 TBW, 1600 TBW, and 3200 TBW respectively. Kingston includes a five-year warranty with the KC3000.

Packaging

The Drive

The drive uses the M.2 2280 form factor, which makes it 22 mm wide and 80 mm long.


While most other M.2 NVMe SSDs transfer data over the PCI-Express 3.0 x4 interface, the Kingston KC3000 connects to the host system over a PCI-Express 4.0 x4 interface, which doubles the theoretical bandwidth.


On the top side of the SSD, Kingston installed this metal foil, probably aluminium. According to Kingston's website, the black coating is graphene—a special nano-arrangement of carbon atoms that has outstanding heat-transfer properties. I tested the material and have to call BS on that claim. It's non-conductive and doesn't scrape off easily—two requirements for actual graphene. I suspect this is just black paint. Even if it were graphene, it wouldn't make any difference because the aluminium foil already takes care of spreading the heat, and the mass of the heatsink is minimal, so it can't store much heat anyway.


On the PCB, you'll find the controller, eight flash chips, and two DRAM chips.

Chip Component Analysis

The Phison PS5018-E18 is Phison's PCI-Express 4.0 controller with eight channels. It is produced on TSMC's 12 nanometer node and uses five Arm Cortex R5 CPU cores. The E18 supports NVMe 1.4, TLC, DDR4 memory, and up to 32 dies.


The eight flash chips are Micron 176-layer 3D TLC NAND B47R. Kingston buys the wafers in bulk, tests and processes the chips, and packages them with their own branding.


Two Kingston DDR4-2666 chips provide a total of 2 GB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables.

Test Setup