Introduction

With revenue in the multi-billion dollars range, 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.



In today's review we're taking a look at the Kingston NV2, which was announced earlier this month. Kingston isn't sending out review samples of this drive, so I just bought one locally, supply is quite good. Back in December 2021 I reviewed the Kingston NV1, and was a bit disappointed by the low overall performance due to compromises Kingston made to achieve its great price point. The Kingston NV2 is trying to address these issues with a new combination of NAND flash and controller, supporting the modern PCI-Express Gen 4 interface. While the Kingston NV1 used the Silicon Motion SM2263XT controller, the NV2 is built using Phison's E21. In terms of flash, it seems that Kingston switched to 112-layer BiCS5 TLC for the NV2, they rebranded the chips and didn't comment on the components used, I asked. Neither of the drives has a DRAM cache chip, which makes sense, given the value-oriented positioning.

The Kingston NV2 comes in capacities of 256 GB ($30), 512 GB ($45), 1 TB ($80) and 2 TB ($160). Endurance for these models is set to 80 TBW, 160 TBW, 320 TB, and 640 TBW, respectively. Kingston includes a three-year warranty with the NV2 SSD.