By Kingston’s NV2 from the previous year offered excellent value for the SSD money. The NV3 this year is still incredibly reasonably priced, but it has been greatly enhanced; it even broke the previous record when creating our 450GB single file. Who would have guessed?
What are the features of the Kingston NV3?
To save costs, the NV3 is a PCIe 4.0 x4 (four lane), M.2 NVMe SSD that uses a DRAM-less (Host Memory Buffer/HMB) design. The NAND is Kingston-labeled, stacked QLC, and the controller is a Silicon Motion SM2268XG. At least that’s what I think based on the TBW rating and performance off cache.
Kingston did not specify the precise type of NAND or the number of layers, and the company claims that they will differ depending on the capacity.
What is the price of the Kingston NV3?
There are three varieties of NV3: 500GB/$54, 1TB/$77, and 2TB/$154 (tested). Although it is not yet priced, a 4TB version is in the pipeline.
Even though NV3 is really cheap, you can lose some peace of mind in the process. Instead of the customary five-year warranty, the drive is only covered for three years. Furthermore, although we have observed as low as 250TBW for QLC NAND, the TBW (terabytes that may be written) rating is a meager 320TBW per terabyte of NAND.
Kingston NV3 500GB M.2 2280 NVMe SSD | PCIe 4.0 Gen 4×4 | Up to 5000 MB/s | SNV3S/500G
We hypothesized that the NV3 used a QLC drive because the prior low was for one. For some reason, vendors’ predictions for QLC’s longevity aren’t quite as optimistic as those for TLC. Still, for the typical user, 160TB is a lot of writing.
I received a 2230 (only 30mm long) small-fry version of the NV3 from Kingston on 9/12/25. Although it costs $45 for 500GB, $68 for 1TB, and $130 for 2TB, the performance is almost the same. The TBW ratings are the same.
What is the Kingston NV3’s speed?
The NV3‘s real-world results were somewhat better than the synthetic benchmark results, which were a little below average for an HMB architecture. Not to mention a significant upgrade over its predecessor, the NV2.
While the Crucial P310 is a tiny form-factor 2230 (22mm wide, 30mm long), the Corsair M600 Elite and Crucial P310 are both equally performant 2TB PCIe 4.0 host memory buffer designs, as seen in the charts.
