KINGSTON KC3000

This Gen4 SSD was worth waiting for: it offers superb value for money if you don't need cutting-edge speeds

One of the last companies to offer a PCI-E Gen4 M.2 SSD, Kingston certainly hasn't messed about with the final product, delivering a fast and enduring piece of storage. We've reviewed the 2TB model (technically 2,048GB), although there are also 512GB, 1,024GB and 4,096GB models in the lineup, too.

This particular SSD offers headline speeds of up to 7,000MB/sec read and write. Not only does this make it one of the fastest drives on paper, it puts it beyond the minimum specifications required for use in the PS5.

Similar to the Seagate FireCuda 530, the Kingston KC3000 doesn't use DRAM as a cache but instead uses part of the drive in SLC mode. This reduces hardware costs and, as the KC3000 can use up to one-third of the storage space for the cache, means there's more for Windows to play with. Well, there is up to the point that the drive is full, as using part of the drive in SLC mode only works while there's spare space; as the drive fills up, SLC has to be converted back to TLC.

Still, this approach is a clever one, and the SSD reaps the benefits in our benchmarks. Managing 3,278 in the PCMark 10 System Disk benchmark and 4,607 in the Data Disk benchmark, the Kingston KC3000 is one of the fastest drives available.