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 KC3000 and NV2.



Today we're reviewing Kingston's newest value-oriented solid-state-drive. The Kingston NV3 is built using the new Silicon Motion SM2268XT2 controller, which was released earlier this year. It's an evolutionary improvement of the SM2268XT, which has been on the market for a year or so. The XT2 is optimized for cost-efficient SSD designs, thanks to support for QLC NAND flash and DRAM-less operation. In terms of flash chips, Kingston uses Kioxia/Toshiba BiCS6 162-layer QLC NAND, which is the company's leading flash, but chips with 218-layers are already on the horizon. As expected for a low-cost drive, the Kingston NV3 does not have a dedicated DRAM cache chip, but can use up to 64 MB of the system's main memory through the HMB mechanism.

The Kingston NV3 is available in capacities of 500 GB ($53), 1 TB ($75), 2 TB ($150) and 4 TB (launching in Q4 2024). The endurance is set to 160 TBW, 320 TBW, 640 TBW and 1280 TBW respectively. Kingston includes a three-year warranty with the NV3 SSD.

Packaging

The Drive

The drive is designed for the M.2 2280 form factor, which makes it 22 mm wide and 80 mm long.


PCI-Express 4.0 x4 is used as the host interface to the rest of the system, which doubles the theoretical bandwidth compared to PCIe 3.0 x4.


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

Chip Component Analysis

The Silicon Motion SM2268XT2 is a new design from SMI, which has support for DRAM-less operation with HMB, using a PCI-Express 4.0 x4 NVMe 2.0 interface. Four NAND channels are available at speeds up to 3600 MT/s. The controller is produced using a 12 nanometer production process at TSMC Taiwan. Compared to SM2268XT, the XT2 is a slightly improved version, on a more energy-efficient process, with support for higher memory clocks.


The four flash chips are Kioxia 162-layer 3D QLC NAND. Each chip has a capacity of 1 TB.

Test Setup

Synthetic Testing

• Tests are run with a 20-second-long warm-up time (result recording starts at second 21).
• Between each test, the drive is left idle for 60 seconds, to allow it to flush and reorganize its internal data.
• All write requests contain random, incompressible data.
• Disk cache is flushed between all tests.
• During these tests, M.2 drives are tested with additional active fan-cooling, to ensure thermal throttling can't happen

Real-life Testing

• After initial configuration and installation, a disk image is created; it is used to test every drive.
• Automated updates are disabled for the OS and all programs. This ensures that—for every review—each drive uses the same settings, without interference from previous testing.
• Our disk image consumes around 700 GB—partitions are resized to fill all available space on the drive.
• All drives are filled with random data to 85% of their capacity. This is intentional, to run the drive in realistic operating conditions—nobody uses a nearly-empty SSD in their system. It also puts additional stress on the pseudo-SLC cache subsystem, because there is less free NAND space to work with.
• Partitions are aligned properly.
• Disk cache is flushed between all tests.
• In order to minimize random variation, each real-life performance test is run several times, with reboots between tests to minimize the impact of disk cache.
• All application benchmarks run the actual application and do not replay any disk traces.
• Our real-life testing data includes performance numbers for a typical high-performance HDD, using results from a Western Digital WD Black 1 TB 7200 RPM 3.5" SATA. HDDs are significantly slower than SSDs, which is why we're not putting the result in the chart, as that would break the scaling, making the SSDs indistinguishable in comparison. Instead, we've added the HDD performance numbers in the title of each test entry.
• During these tests, M.2 drives are tested with additional active fan-cooling, to ensure thermal throttling can't happen