The Kingston KC3000 is a solid-state drive in the M.2 2280 form factor, launched in October 2021. It is available in capacities ranging from 512 GB to 4 TB. This page reports specifications for the 1 TB variant. With the rest of the system, the Kingston KC3000 interfaces using a PCI-Express 4.0 x4 connection. The SSD controller is the PS5018-E18-41 from Phison, a DRAM cache chip is available. Kingston has installed 176-layer TLC NAND flash on the KC3000, the flash chips are made by Micron. Please note that this SSD is sold in multiple variants with different NAND flash or controller, which could affect performance, the "Notes" section at the end of this page has more info. To improve write speeds, a pseudo-SLC cache is used, so bursts of incoming writes are processed more quickly. The cache is sized at 369 GB, once it is full, writes complete at 1900 MB/s. Copying data out of the SLC cache (folding) completes at 1015 MB/s. Thanks to support for the fast PCI-Express 4.0 interface, performance is excellent. The KC3000 is rated for sequential read speeds of up to 7,000 MB/s and 6,000 MB/s write; random IOPS reach up to 900K for reads and 1000K for writes.
At its launch, the SSD was priced at 175 USD. The warranty length is set to five years, which is an excellent warranty period. Kingston guarantees an endurance rating of 800 TBW, a typical value for consumer SSDs.