Introduction

With revenue in the multi-billion dollars, Kingston is the largest DRAM and flash memory products vendor in the world. While their strongest suit is memory modules and USB/flash card storage, they are also a major player in the SSD market, having released famous products such as the KC2000 and KC2500.



Today, we are testing Kingston's entry-level M.2 NVMe SSD aptly named NV1. The Kingston NV1 is marketed as "ideal for thin notebook and systems with limited space," which already makes it clear that Kingston is excited about the form factor and doesn't see performance as the most important benefit. The Kingston NV1 launched a few months ago, and I asked Kingston for samples, but they said they are not sampling the drive. Since Black Friday, the price of the NV1 has dropped considerably, so I got curious and bought one myself.

Internally, the Kingston NV1 uses an SM2263XT controller paired with 96-layer QLC NAND flash from Micron. A DRAM cache chip is not available for cost reasons. To connect with the rest of the system, the older PCI-Express 3.0 interface is used. What's surprising is that the few reviews that do exist all report that the NV1 uses a Phison PS5013-E13T controller instead of the SM2263XT installed on our drive—guess like many other vendors, Kingston is playing the SSD component switch game, too.

The Kingston NV1 comes in capacities of 250 GB ($35), 500 GB ($45), 1 TB ($85), and 2 TB ($155). Endurance for these models is set to 60 TBW, 120 TBW, 240 TBW, and 480 TBW respectively. Kingston includes a five-year warranty with the NV1 SSD.