About as good as PCIe 3.0-based NVMe drives get. Ready for initialism overload? It's easy to pick up an M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD based on price alone. Spending £100 or so heralds a 1TB model outfitted with the latest NAND capable of hitting peak sequential speeds in excess of 2,000MB/s read and write. Spending getting on towards double that amount brings PCIe 4.0 drives into play, usually outfitted with the Phison E16 controller, which hit 5GB/s read and writes on the latest AMD platforms when outfitted with suitably speedy NAND.

Yet there are plenty of interesting choices between these two bookend prices for 1TB drives. Does it make sense to spend £170 on a PCIe 3.0 model touting premium features when PCIe 4.0 is very much in the frame? This is the quandary that Kingston finds itself in with the KC2500. Here's how it rolls.