The Kingston KC3000 (starts at $106.99 for 512GB; $399.99 for 2TB as tested) is a speedy internal solid-state drive geared to content creators and gamers. It’s one of the rare internal SSDs that comes in capacities up to 4TB, though the largest size costs more per gigabyte than the lower capacities. The KC3000 proved to be among the faster PCI Express (PCIe) Gen 4 drives we’ve tested; it did great in our PCMark 10 benchmarks, which measure a drive’s speed in performing everyday tasks such as loading programs, though not so well in the AS-SSD tests that involve copying folders full of small files. All in all, this Kingston is a capable drive that’s a welcome addition to the high-end PCIe 4.0 arena.
A Spacious High-Performance SSD
The KC3000 is a four-lane PCI Express 4.0 drive employing 176-layer TLC 3D NAND flash memory. It’s manufactured on an M.2 Type-2280 (80mm long) “gumstick” printed circuit board. It uses the NVMe 1.4 protocol over the PCIe 4.0 bus, and features the same Phison E18 controller that we’ve seen in other high-performance PCIe Gen 4 SSDs such as the MSI Spatium M480 HS, the Mushkin Gamma, and the Teamgroup T-Force Cardea A440. (Puzzled by the M.2 and PCIe jargon? Check out our guide to SSD terminology.)
The drive deploys an ultra-thin graphene-aluminum heat spreader that lets it fit into slots too small for SSDs with finned metal heatsinks. While the 2TB and 4TB drives are double-sided, the 512GB and 1TB models have all their chips on one side of the stick.
Based on Kingston’s direct pricing, which as of this writing is considerably lower than Amazon’s, the KC3000 sells for 20 cents per gigabyte for the 2TB drive we tested and 17 cents per gig for the 1TB model. This puts it in the middle of the pack for high-performance PCIe 4.0 SSDs. The Samsung SSD 980 Pro sells for 18 and 19 cents per gigabyte respectively in its 1TB and 2TB capacities. The respective prices for the same capacities of the Crucial P5 Plus are 18 and 17 cents. One drive that costs appreciably less than the KC3000 is the ADATA XPG Gammix S70 Blade, whose 1TB version sells for 15 cents per gig and 2TB model for 14 cents per gig.
The KC3000 is one of the few internal SSDs we’ve tested, and the only TLC-based model, to offer capacities as high as 4TB. That said, you pay considerably more per gigabyte (about a quarter) for the Kingston than you would for the 4TB Sabrent Rocket Q4, which sells for 17 cents a gig, or the 4TB Mushkin Delta, which is just 13 cents per gigabyte. That said, the KC3000 offers higher durability than those two QLC-based drives.
The durability ratings for the KC3000, as measured in terabytes written (TBW), are a bit above average for a TLC-based drive. The S70 Blade is rated at 740TBW for the 1TB version and 1,480TBW for the 2TB. The Crucial P5 Plus has slightly lower ratings of 600TBW for the 1TB model and 1,200TBW for the 2TB drive, while the 1TB Samsung SSD 980 Pro is also rated at 600TBW.
A few PCIe 4.0 drives offer considerably higher durability ratings than the KC3000—the Corsair Force Series MP600 and Silicon Power US70 are rated at 1,800TBW for 1TB and 3,600TBW for 2TB. At the other extreme, the Mushkin Delta and Sabrent Rocket Q4—which use less write-durable QLC memory—are rated at just 200TBW for 1TB, 400TBW for 2TB, and 800TBW for 4TB.
The “terabytes written” spec is a manufacturer’s estimate of how much data can be written to a drive before some cells begin to fail and get taken out of service. (TBW tends to scale 1:1 with capacity, and that’s true with the KC3000.) Kingston’s warranty for the KC3000 is good for five years or until you hit the rated TBW figure in data writes, whichever comes first.
Kingston provides a license key for Acronis True Image HD software for cloning your data to the drive. The KC3000 lacks the AES 256-bit hardware-based encryption found in the ADATA S70 Blade and MSI M480 HS.
Testing the Kingston KC3000: Fast, and Good at Everyday Storage Tasks
We test PCI Express 4.0 internal SSDs using a desktop testbed with an MSI X570 motherboard and AMD Ryzen CPU, 16GB of Corsair Dominator DDR4 memory clocked to 3,600MHz, and a discrete graphics card. (See more about how we test SSDs.)
We put the KC3000 through our usual suite of internal solid-state drive benchmarks, comprising Crystal DiskMark 6.0, PCMark 10 Storage, and AS-SSD. Crystal DiskMark’s sequential speed tests provide a traditional measure of drive throughput, simulating best-case, straight-line transfers of large files.
The KC3000’s sequential speeds of 6,475MBps read and 6,333MBps write land it in a close group of four high-performance drives with similar scores. It fell short of the ADATA S70 Blade’s speeds, as well its own ratings of 7,000MBps for both read and write. The Kingston’s scores in Crystal DiskMark’s 4K read and write tests were both a little above average.
The AS-SSD benchmarking utility initiates a series of file and folder transfers. This trio of tests measures a drive’s speed in copying files or folders from one location on the drive to another. While the KC3000’s ISO copy speed test was about average, it delivered the lowest scores of the group in both the AS-SSD program and game copy speed tests. While the ISO test involves copying a single large ISO file, both the program and game copy tests measure the drive’s speed in copying a folder containing multiple small files.
The overall PCMark 10 Storage test, which runs the full storage suite, measures an SSD’s readiness for a wide variety of everyday tasks. PCMark 10 also provides some more granular measures, derived from the benchmark’s background “traces,” which assess a drive’s speed in launching particular apps and the Windows operating system.
In PCMark 10’s overall storage test, the KC3000 had the second highest score, edged out by the Crucial P5 Plus. It posted the highest score in the Call of Duty gaming test and the second highest in Overwatch. It also had a high score in launching Adobe Photoshop, tied with the ADATA S70 Blade, and had the best scores in PCMark’s ISO and file copy tests.
PCIe 4.0 Goodness From Kingston
Although it didn’t quite match its rated sequential read and write speeds in our tests, the Kingston KC3000 proved to be a speedy PCI Express 4 NVMe internal drive. It generally did well in our benchmarks—particularly in PCMark 10, which measures a drive’s speed in everyday tasks such as loading different programs—though poorly in the AS-SSD benchmarks that involve transferring folders of small files.
The KC3000 is one of the few internal M.2 solid-state drives—and the only TLC-based one—that we’ve tested that offers a 4TB capacity for storage-starved users. However, that model has a higher cost per gigabyte than the 2TB version and is priced considerably above the QLC-based 4TB drives we’ve reviewed. Still, with the KC3000 you get a speedy, roomy drive that performed well in most of our tests.
