Kingston KC3000 PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD - High-performance storage for desktop and laptop PCs -SKC3000S/1024G

Product Information

Recording a 1080p gameplay video at 60 FPS with OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) while playing Overwatch.

When it comes to benchmarking storage devices, application testing is best, and synthetic testing comes in second place. While not a perfect representation of actual workloads, synthetic tests do help to baseline storage devices with a repeatability factor that makes it easy to do apples-to-apples comparison between competing solutions. These workloads offer a range of different testing profiles ranging from “four corners” tests, common database transfer size tests, to trace captures from different VDI environments.Estimated delivery times are provided to us by the respective delivery companies. We pass this information onto you, the customer.

VDI FC Initial Login saw all the drives with unstable results. That said, the KC3000 topped out at roughly 70K IOPS at 426.4 µs in latency before taking a severe spike in performance to end the test. The on test that still sets the FireCuda 530 apart from the rest is the 450GB sustained write. The KC3000’s time is nothing to sneeze at however. Shorter bars are better. Our 1TB KC3000 sample absorbed 369GB of data at a rate of 6,050 MBps before degrading to roughly 1,015 MBps for the remainder of the test. Unfortunately, the KC3000 did not recover any of its SLC cache during the idle recovery rounds, but its write speed measured roughly 1.9 GBps instead of 1 GBps. Power Consumption and Temperature The Kingston KC3000 is the company’s latest premium SSD offering available in the industry-standard M.2 2280 form factor and in capacities from 512GB to 4TB. Specifically designed for enthusiasts and power users looking to get the most out of the new NVMe Gen4 interface, Kingston indicates that the KC3000 is best suited for 3D rendering and 4K+ content creation software applications.Next, we switched over to our VDI full clone test. For our boot profile, the Kingston KC3000 SSD peaked at 129,099 IOPS at a latency of 261.5µs. This was good enough for second place, though well behind the first place WD SN850. The new Kingston offering is also the latest Gen4 SSD to use the effective combination of the Phison PS5018-E18 controller and Micron’s B47R 3D TLC NAND. The E18 leverages the new TSMC 12nm process node (a significant improvement from the previous 28nm), which increases performance by up to 25% over the previous generation. This noticeable difference allows greater power efficiency and lower thermal output. All of the combined means faster potential performance of SSDs. We previously saw the E18 used inside drives like the Seagate FireCuda 530 and Corsair MP600 Pro XT, and expect more of the same impressive numbers in our Kingston KC3000 charts. For reliability, the KC3000 has an MTBF of 1,800,000 hours and an endurance rating (total bytes written) of 1.6PBW for the 2TB capacity model. The latter value is noticeably lower than the Seagate Firecuda 530‘s 2.55PBW. It’s higher than Corsair though, which continues this inconsistent endurance spec on E18 SSDs. All of these tests leverage the common vdBench workload generator, with a scripting engine to automate and capture results over a large compute testing cluster. This allows us to repeat the same workloads across a wide range of storage devices, including flash arrays and individual storage devices. Our testing process for these benchmarks fills the entire drive surface with data, then partitions a drive section equal to 5% of the drive capacity to simulate how the drive might respond to application workloads. This is different than full entropy tests which use 100% of the drive and take them into a steady state. As a result, these figures will reflect higher-sustained write speeds. UL's newest 3DMark SSD Gaming Test is the most comprehensive SSD gaming test ever devised. We consider it superior to testing against games themselves because, as a trace, it is much more consistent than variations that will occur between runs on the actual game itself. This test is in fact the same as running the actual game, just without the inconsistencies inherent to application testing.