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.