Today we are going to take a quick look at the Kingston KC1000 NVMe PCIe SSD that came out in June 2017. This drive series is coming up on being a year old, but has some monster performance numbers that can’t be ignored. The Kingston KC1000 has up to 2700 MB/s sequential read and 1600 MB/s sequential write speeds. The Random 4K performance numbers are rated at up to 290,000 IOPS Read and 160,000 IOPS Write. Kingston was able to pull off these super-fast performance numbers on the KC1000 by utilizing the PCIe Gen 3.0 x 4 interface and pairing an 8-channel Phison PS5007-E7 controller with Toshiba 15nm 2D Planer MLC NAND Flash.

Performance numbers are nice to talk about, but reliability and endurance are major factors one needs to think about when purchasing a drive to store data on. All drives in the Kingston KC1000 series are backed by a 5-year warranty and free technical support. They have a 2,000,000 hour Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) rating, which is the predicted elapsed time between inherent failures during normal system operation. The endurance rating on the KC1000 series is also about as good as it gets as the 960GB drive for example has a 1 PB (as in 1,000,000 Gigabytes) Total Bytes Written (TBW) rating or 0.58 Drive Writes Per Day (DWPD) when you factor in the drives 5-year warranty.