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.