With the NV2 M.2 solid-state-drive, Kingston is bolstering their offerings in the NVMe storage sector. Their newest drive finally brings affordable PCI-Express 4.0 to the masses. While I wasn't exactly impressed by the Kingston NV1 last year, the NV2 is a huge improvement over the NV1, turning out to be a great choice for builders of cost-efficient systems. Just like the NV1, the NV2 is a low-cost drive, which means Kingston doesn't guarantee any components: "As an entry level consumer SSD, we will use a variety of NAND & Controller combinations in order to meet the volume demand in the market." While this sounds scary at first, Kingston guarantees that any new hardware combination will reach the official specs, that's "PCI-Express 4.0 x4", "3.5 GB/s read" and "2.1 GB/s write" among others. While the sequential transfer speeds would theoretically let them use some Gen 3 hardware configs, the "PCIe 4" promise will limit them in downgrading the drive. The drive that we are reviewing today is from retail, not provided by Kingston, so we can be sure it's not some sort of special press sample.

In terms of components we found a Phison E21T PCIe 4.0 controller, which is a massive upgrade over the SM2263XT on the NV1 and acts as the cornerstone for the performance improvements. Also on-board is 1 TB of TLC NAND from Toshiba, probably in the 112-layer variant, but we're not 100% sure yet, Kingston wouldn't comment on this at all. As expected, a DRAM cache chip isn't included, it wasn't part of the NV1 predecessor either—the Phison E21 controller is optimized for DRAM-less operation. We specifically looked into DRAM-less performance on page 5 and can confirm that the E21 is Phison's best DRAM-less controller to-date.

Phison also did a great job optimizing for synthetic tests on an empty drive, like most reviewers test with CrystalDiskMark, AS-SSD, etc. Here the drive reaches impressive random IO numbers that top our charts. Sequential reads are very good, too, reaching up to 7 GB/s, which is twice the official Kingston spec—looks like they left themselves some headroom here. Writes are much lower with 3 GB/s, but still 50% higher than the marketed speed. You might be asking now: "3 GB/s, isn't that PCIe 3.0 territory?" Correct, for the writes alone the NV2 would be ok with a Gen 3 interface, but since the vast majority of data transfers on a consumer are reads, the faster interface does help. Also, the more important number is random IO at low queue depths, and here the NV2 performs very well.

To confirm these theoretical considerations, we ran our extensive real-life benchmarking suite on the drive. We're testing with actual applications, not disk traces, and all testing is performed at 80% disk full, which is much more realistic than a mostly empty SSD. Here the NV2 confirms that it's a huge improvement over the NV1. While the NV1 was the slowest M.2 NVMe SSD we ever tested, the NV2 is able to match most PCIe 3.0 high-end SSDs. "Only Gen 3?"—this is still a monumental achievement. Remember, these SSDs are using an 8-channel controller design, DRAM cache, more expensive TLC flash and heatsinks—the NV2 will happily run without those features and still offer good performance. Of course, the fastest PCIe 4.0 drives offer better performance, but the differences are surprisingly small, especially when you take the cost difference into account. This makes the NV2 a great upgrade option when you're coming from SATA, or even a mechanical HDD.

Just like all other modern SSDs, the Kingston NV2 comes with a pseudo-SLC cache that operates some flash capacity in single-cell mode, to quickly absorb incoming writes. With 88 GB, the SLC cache is relatively small for a new release, but not "too small", more like "could be bigger". Filling the whole 1 TB capacity completed at 620 MB/s (almost 5x as fast as the Kingston NV1), which is a good result that greatly exceeds what older QLC SSDs offered (120-350 MB/s), and pretty much matches the major competitors, e.g. WD Blue SN570 (590 MB/s), Samsung 980 (600 MB/s), WD Black SN770 (630 MB/s) and XPG Atom 50 (805 MB/s). It is also important that this number is considerably higher than what the SATA interface allows, so you can feed it data from SATA all day and the drive will not slow down. If you're copying hundreds of gigabytes from fast sources all the time, then you might want to consider a more high-end SSD though.

Kingston does not include a heatsink with the NV2, and that's no problem at all. Even in our worst-case thermal load testing, we couldn't get the drive to thermally throttle. Actually, temperatures were very decent, with only 72°C after the drive got hammered with hundreds of GB of incoming writes. The secret sauce is Phison's new controller design, which is fabricated on a highly efficient 12 nanometer production process, bringing with it better energy efficiency and leading to a lower heat output—good job, Phison. This efficient nature makes the drive a good choice for notebooks, where airflow and cooling capabilities are minimal.

The Kingston NV2 is widely available online at around $80 for the tested 1 TB version, which is a very competitive price, especially considering this is a PCIe 4.0 SSD. This capability will also make the drive a hugely popular option for system integrators, because they can put "Gen 4" in their spec sheets. With this pricing, the NV2 is near the top of our price/performance charts, definitely worth considering if you're looking for a cost-efficient SSD for a family PC, media PC or as secondary drive for your high-end gaming rig. Kingston's NV1 is roughly similar priced as the NV2, it's really no competition. Even when you only have a Gen 3 capable slot, do buy the NV2, it'll be a lot faster than the NV1. The strongest competitors to NV2 are Samsung 980 non-Pro (similar perf, but $105), WD Blue SN570 (similar perf and price), Crucial P3 Plus (similar perf, but $95), WD Black SN770 (faster, $95, could be worth it). Since pricing varies over time and also geographically, look up your prices for these SSDs before you make a buying decision.