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.

Packaging

The Drive

The drive uses the M.2 2280 form factor, making 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 NV2 connects to the host system using PCI-Express 4.0 x4, doubling the theoretical bandwidth.


On the PCB you'll find the controller and four flash chips, a DRAM cache chip is not present.

Chip Component Analysis

The Phison PS5021-E21 is Phison's newest PCI-Express 4.0 controller. It's a cost-optimized model, with four flash channels and support for TLC and QLC NAND. Phison has designed the E21 for DRAM-less operation, and it supports the NVMe 1.4 protocol. The controller itself is fabricated using a 12 nanometer process at TSMC Taiwan.


The four flash chips have been rebranded by Kingston. Our best guess is that they are Toshiba 112-layer 3D TLC BiCS5 NAND. Each chip has a capacity of 256 GB.

Test Setup