The Kingston KC1000 240 GB is a solid mid-range M.2 NVMe SSD that doesn't break the bank and offers good performance for today's consumer workloads. Important circuitry on the M.2 2280 board is a Phison controller and eight Toshiba MLC flash chips, which, when heavily loaded, don't suffer from the write hole TLC exhibits. So if you trust MLC more than TLC, which in my opinion is a thing of the past, the Kingston KC1000 should definitely be on your shopping list.

In our real-life testing, we see good performance that's roughly in the middle of the M.2 pack, with just a few percentage points separating the drives. The synthetic tests show a slight deficit in sequential write speeds, but the drive makes up for that with random IO performance. Do note that the 240 GB version has significantly lower write speeds than the higher capacity models. Kingston specifies the 240 GB model for 900 MB/s writes, while the 480 GB and 960 GB versions are rated for 1600 MB/s. One thing has to be clear though: NVMe doesn't magically make your disk IO infinitely fast. Modern 2.5" SATA drives are already very fast, shifting the performance bottleneck away from storage and towards CPU and software algorithms. NVMe can just shift that a little bit more without showing the huge gains we all experienced when switching from HDD to SSD.

Unlike other drives, the KC1000 doesn't come with a heatsink or heatspreader, which results in some throttling during our thermal tests. The actual drive temperature peaks at slightly above 100°C, which is high, but is no reason for concern. Also, getting to a point at which throttling causes a significant loss in performance is not easy. You basically have to fill up most of the drive's capacity in one go, which happens only when restoring a backup. But then you have to consider that the source of your backup, which might be on a network on SATA, won't even be fast enough to make a difference. Still, I would have liked to see some sort of cooling on the KC1000 - even if it's just to reassure users that their drive won't run hot.

Price-wise, the KC1000 clocks in at a reasonable $130 for the tested 240 GB version, especially when you consider the included PCIe adapter which lets you run the card in older systems that lack M.2 slots. However, if you have no use for that adapter, then competing drives, which are just now breaking the $100 barrier (for 240 GB), could become a viable option, too.