KINGSTON NV1 1TB

amazon KINGSTON NV1 1TB reviews

As the mainstream M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD storage family for mini PC desktops or lightweight notebooks, the NV1 continues Kingston’s ambitions in the entry-level PCIe SSD segment at an affordable price.

With the proliferation of thin and light laptops or small desktops, NVMe PCIe SSDs are increasingly popular, gradually replacing SATA SSDs thanks to their undeniable advantages in speed, compactness, and ease of use when the price is not much higher.

Kingston, an American technology company that is very familiar to users in products such as memory cards, RAM, USB … is also a name with “famous” in the SSD array. The company continuously launches various SSDs, ranging from popular to high-end, and the NV1 series in Kingston’s breakthrough in the popular M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD segment.

With NV1, this can be considered a successor to the A2000 model and is available in 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB. The NV1 drive comes with a 3-year limited warranty with free technical support.

The version of Kingston NV1 that BiaReview evaluated in this article has a capacity of 1TB, has a maximum read/write speed (sequential) of 2,100/1,700 MB/s, and endurance of 240TBW.

Unboxing and design overview

If you’ve ever used Kingston’s memory card products, you’ll immediately recognize the familiar NV1 packaging. Still simple white tone style, without the prominent motifs like competitors. The way Kingston arranges outstanding features is a bit “naive” when there are no parameters such as maximum speed or PCIe Gen3 x4 NVMe connection standard. But simply capacity drive, warranty period, and number 35X (with a small caption next to it explaining the speed of the NV1 is 35 times faster than… HDD 7200rpm!).

The back of the packaging is densely packed with words in all kinds of languages. Still, it only adds unimportant information as the product is packaged in Taiwan; the actual capacity may be less than 1TB. Perhaps the most valuable is that the product is designed for use with laptops and desktops, not recommended for server environments.

Unboxing, the main character begins to appear more clearly. The blue PCB board and the black and white color scheme for the sticker make the NV1 feel eye-catching. The important information to consider is the serial number, capacity level, voltage standard, and especially the warranty will not cover you if you remove this sticker. Standard design M.2 2280, no heat dissipation, so the NV1 is compatible with most desktop and ultra-thin laptops.

Notably, Kingston includes a license key of Acronis True Image HD software so that users can back up the entire old drive or some partitions to NV1. Clone the operating system, restore data previously backed up data, and create Windows installations from USB drives or CD/DVDs. However, this license key is hidden quite well, so when you open the box, you should be careful lest it is easy to tear it off.

NV1 has a 1-sided design of DRAM-less chip. In the 1TB version that BiaReview experienced, you can see that the product has 4 NAND chips if you look closely.

Searching for more information online, I learned that this Kingston NV1 uses Phison’s PS50132-E13-31 controller. That is a fairly familiar controller model on mid-range PCIe SSD products. With NAND chips, Kingston uses a “homegrown” version of QLC instead of Toshiba’s NAND memory. Each NAND chip on the 1TB NV1 version will have a capacity of 256GB.

Benchmark performance and actual usage

As mentioned at the beginning of the article, Kingston NV1 1TB is announced with a maximum read/write speed (sequential) of 2,100/1,700 MB/s, endurance of 240TBW.

Testing the performance of Kingston NV1, BiaReview uses the system with the following configuration:

– CPU: Intel Core i7 8700

– Motherboard: MSI Z370-A Pro

– RAM: Gskill Trident Z RGB DDR4 4x8GB 3200MHz

– VGA: Gigabyte GTX 1060 G1 Gaming 6GB

– PSU: FSP Saga 550W

It is not mentioned on the packaging; if you visit the Kingston website, you can download the Kingston SSD Manager software to monitor the drive health, check if there is a firmware update, check the operating temperature, the amount of space written. To the drive, enable security features.

The first test is the actual data copying task; BiaReview selected two situations, including copying the folder containing the game League of Legends data with a capacity of 12.2 GB with many 794 files and 161 messages. Different size sub-items. Scenario 2 is to copy more than a folder containing 1070 JPG image files and six subfolders ranging in size from 2-15MB, totaling 6.91GB.

In the first scenario, with a folder containing game data weighing 12.2GB, the NV1 initially reached 159MB/s, gradually increasing to 550 to 600 MB/s, peaking at about 3GB of data, then suddenly increased to 1GB to 1.3GB/s and ended up at around 679MB/s. The total time to complete the copy took 19 seconds, equivalent to an average speed of about 657.5 MB/s.

As for the situation of copying a 6.91GB photo folder, the NV1 gave a very stable speed of 2.09GB / s in the first 4GB range. When about the last 3GB left, the speed gradually decreased from 1.97GB/s to 1.41GB/s. The total time to complete the copy takes 5 seconds, equivalent to an average speed of about 1.41GB / s.

Next is Crystal Disk Mark, one of the most intuitive, easy-to-use hard drive benchmark tools available today. That is also the application used by most hard drive manufacturers to announce their products’ read/write speed.

For this tool, ordinary users will need to care about two results: sequential read and write speed and access speed 4KB random output.

The results show that the sequential read and write scores of Kingston NV1 are 2080.03 MB/s and 1747.29 MB/s, respectively, approximately equivalent to Kingston’s announced (2100/1700 MB/s) at the same level good. Meanwhile, NV1’s random data read and write access speed is also quite good, respectively 53.78MB/s read and 237.83MB/s write.

Next is the AS SSD benchmark software, which more accurately reflects the hard drive speed than Crystal Disk Mark because it uses incompressible data instead of compressing it to lower the speed. The overall score of the Kingston NV1 is 3536.

AS SSD also has another tool, Compression Benchmark, which measures the hard drive data compression speed with compression levels from 0% to 100%. In theory, the ideal result is two green and red lines corresponding to the read and write speeds of data as straight and as high as possible, indicating the controller’s stability. However, the Kingston NV1 surprised me when it got faster and faster; even though I tried it a few times, it still gave me the same results. If possible, I will try to add more hard drives and update the information in the article.

ATTO Disk Benchmark is an old but still trusted tool that allows users to monitor hard drive performance in detail in various data size options. BiaReview set the drive to access 256MB of data in this test, with file sizes from 512B to 64MB. Kingston NV1 has the highest speed of 2.95GB/s for write and 2.80GB/s for a read. This speed is a bit absurd, especially since the write speed is faster than Kingston’s flagship model, the KC2500, and exceeds Kingston’s number (2.1GB/s read and 1.7GB/s write). Kingston NV1 controllers and flash chips are working miracles.

In terms of gaming performance, SSDs are superior to traditional hard drives thanks to their high data read and write speeds, resulting in significantly reduced screen load times. The Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers benchmark is a reliable tool to measure standard screen load times down to milliseconds. In total, the Kingston NV1 loaded all five levels in 14.287 seconds, which is moderate, slightly slower than my initial expectations.

Regarding the operating temperature, BiaReview monitors the temperature of the Kingston NV1 with Crystal Disk Info software when the drive performs the above benchmarks continuously. During the benchmarking process, the highest temperature recorded by HWmonitor was 53 degrees Celsius. Still, there is information that the monitoring software declares the temperature on the flash chip, not on the controller, so that the actual temperature will be around 73 degrees Celsius. With an SSD model without a heatsink like this, that’s an acceptable number.

Summary

With what is shown, Kingston NV1 1TB deserves to be an attractive SSD model when it owns read and write speed, fast and stable data access, beautiful design with a blue-tone circuit board, useful monitoring software benefits with large capacity. The price of NV1 is also very competitive, almost the cheapest today and significantly lower than fierce competitors such as Western Digital Blue SN550, Samsung 860 EVO, or Crucial P2, while the performance is almost equivalent.

where can you get a KINGSTON NV1 1TB online

Kingston NV1 1TB M.2 2280 NVMe PCIe Internal SSD Up to 2100 MB/s SNVS/1000G: Buy it now