Kingston KC1000 NVMe PCIe SSD 960GB Review

 
The Kingston KC1000 comes in a clamshell type box with a good clear image of the drive on the front along with description of what HHHL stands for, logo for the 5-year warranty and a reminder that the drive comes with free technical support.

The rear of the box has a panel at the top holding multilingual limited warranty information. Under this is another multilingual section, this time with notes about performance, what workloads the KC1000 has been designed to work with and capacity.

Sitting under these are the Sequential read/write figures for all three capacities of drive along with the product codes for all three HHHL models. At the bottom right-hand corner of the box is the product code along with the capacity.

Bundled in with the drive is a low-profile bracket along with a small getting started guide and a download coupon for Acronis True Image backup software.

 
The HHHL (Half-Height, Half-Length) adapter version of the KC1000 means that those people who have an older motherboard without a PCIe M.2 slot but with a spare PCIe x4 slot can still use the drive. It's an attractive looking PCB with the gold trackways standing out well against the black finish of the PCB.

  
The KC1000 drive itself is a M.2 2280 format drive with both sides of the PCB occupied by various components. The drive uses Toshiba 2D 15nm MLC NAND (coded TH58TFT0DFLBA8H) together with a Phison PS5007-E7 controller. The 8-channel PS5007-E7 is Phison's first PCIe NVMe controller bringing support for 1z nm MLC, TLC and 3D NAND.

 
Kingston's SSD management software goes under the name of SSD Manager. It might not be as comprehensive as some of its competitors but it does display Partitioning details, an overview of S.M.A.R.T details, SSD health and drive temperature along the bottom of the page so its fairly straightforward to see what's going on at a glance. The utility also supports updating the drives firmware.

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