Today we are taking a look at the Kingston NV1 1TB SSD. This is the third Kingston SSD I have looked at, and was originally intended as something of a companion piece for the Kingston A2000 review. The NV1 occupies the entry-level slot in Kingston’s SSD stack, and as a result is a DRAM-less QLC drive with very modest performance targets. Let us see how it stacks up!
Kingston NV1 1TB NVMe SSD
The Kingston NV1 1TB comes in a single-sided M.2 2280 (80mm) form factor.
The front of the drive is home to the Phison PS5013-E13 controller. We have seen this controller before on the Crucial P2 and the PNY CS1030. The Kingston NV1 1TB comes equipped with 96-layer Micron QLC; this is similar to the P2 but the CS1030 pair this controller with TLC. No DRAM cache is present on the Kingston NV1.
The back of this single-sided drive is devoid of anything making this a single-sided SSD.
Kingston NV1 Specs
The Kingston NV1 line of drives is available with capacities between 500GB and 2TB.
Our 1TB drive is rated at 2100 MB/s read and 1700 MB/s sequential write. These specs are slightly lower than the A2000 was rated at, as well as being a tick below the Crucial P2 which has similar hardware components. 2100/1700 positions the NV1 as a relatively low-end PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD, but nothing out of the ordinary. Endurance is another matter; at only 240 TBW for the 1TB drive, the Kingston NV1 comes with significantly lower endurance than even the Crucial P2, which I took issue with for only having 300 TBW. While still enough for light duty, the low endurance does not inspire confidence in the longterm reliability of this drive. Combined with the lower 3-year warranty, the NV1 is decidedly entry-level in all respects.
CrystalDiskInfo can give us some basic information about the SSD, and confirms we are operating at PCIe 3.0 x4 speeds using NVMe 1.3.
Test System Configuration
We are using the following configuration for this test:
- Motherboard: ASUS PRIME X570-P
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X (12C/24T)
- RAM: 2x 16GB DDR4-3200 UDIMMs
Our testing uses the Kingston NV1 1TB as the boot drive for the system, installed in the M.2_1 slot on the motherboard. The drive is filled to 85% capacity with data and then some is deleted, leaving around 60% used space on the volume.
Next, we are going to get into our performance testing.
It feels like kingston intentionally set the bar as low as possible so that even if they do component swaps down the road, they can still hit their spec’d performance and endurance figures.
And they seem to have set the low bar splendidly.
For reviews of low end products like this, could you put a 2.5″ HDD’s numbers out for comparison. For sustained write some of the traditional hard drives might be faster. They shouldn’t compete on access time or drop resistance, but with more modern hybrid HDD the access time may be comparable on more real world tests. I can see a number of workloads that might be faster on HDD.
Excellent work on this post about Kingston M.2 SSD