Kingston NV2 SSD review: PCIe 4.0 for penny pinchers

Best Prices Today: Kingston NV2 SSD

You won’t find a more affordable PCIe 4.0 SSD than Kingston’s NV2. It’s slower than the vast majority of its peers, but being NVMe, it’s still adequate for most users and most everyday tasks.

Further reading: See our roundup of the best PCIe 4.0 SSDs to learn about competing products.

What are the Kingston NV2’s features?

The NV2 is a PCIe 4.0 x4, 2280 form factor (22mm wide, 80mm long) M.2, NVMe SSD utilizing a DRAM-less (HMB/host memory buffer) design. The NAND is 144-layer Kingston-labeled QLC handled by a Silicon Motion SM2267XTV controller.

We tested the 1TB capacity of the NV2, but rated performance varies greatly by capacity: For the 250GB capacity it’s 3GBps reading/1.3GBps writing, for the 500GB and 1TB capacities it’s 3.5GBps/2.1GBps, and for the 2TB and 4TB capacities its 3.5GBps/2.8GBps.

The NV2 is warrantied for three years or 320TBW (terabytes that can be written) per terabyte of capacity. Those are paltry compared to most NVMe SSDs, and the low TBW is a dead giveaway that the NAND is QLC.

That said 320TBW per TB isn’t the lowest rating we’ve seen: The Sabrent Rocket Q4, Corsair MP600 Core Mini, and Crucial P3 — all QLC drives — are rated for 225TBW/TB, 250TBW/TB, and 220TBW/TB, respectively.

You are taking a bit of a chance on the NV2 and QLC drives in general, though endurance is generally understood to be greater (often considerably) than vendor TBW ratings, which are factoring in financial liability. Not only that, but most users write far less data than they think.

Still, you didn’t think you’d get Seagate-like backing at these prices, did you? What prices are those? See below.

How much does the NV2 cost?

At the time of this writing the 25GB NV2 was $28, the 500GB was $38, our 1TB drive cost $52, the 2TB was $100, and the 4TB was $187 — all on Amazon (Kingston’s MSRP is $10 to $30 higher). Those prices, folks, are a comparative pittance.

How fast is the Kingston NV2?

All NVMe SSDs are fast — we are comparing the thoroughbreds of storage here. But the NV2 is definitely one of the slowest such devices we’ve tested. It ensconced itself comfortably in next-to-last place, just ahead of the Crucial P3, a very similar design but only PCIe 3.0.

So in point of fact, the NV2 is the slowest PCIe 4.0 SSD we’ve ever tested, and it’s not even particularly close to the next slowest — the Solidigm P41 Plus.

While slower than most, our 1TB NV2 actually exceeded Kingston’s ratings (see above). Note that Kingston was unwilling to fill out our fact-check sheet, so we quoted the ratings from the company’s website.

Again, the NV2 was off the NVMe performance pace in CrystalDiskMark 8’s 4K performance tests. Only the PCIe 3.0 Crucial P3 was slower, and not in every test.

Our 48GB transfers were a relative jaunt for the NV2, which finished tied with, or in front of everything but WD’s excellent TLC SSD, the SN770M. These kind of copies are where most users will be observing a progress bar, so have the most salient impact on performance satisfaction.

The 450GB write was where the NV2 basically fell off a performance cliff, plummeting to an average write speed of 140MBps when it ran out of secondary (QLC written as SLC) cache. Keep in mind that our test model was a 1TB drive, while all the others in the chart were 2TB with more NAND for secondary caching. No doubt, a 2TB or 4TB model would’ve finished with a more competitive time.

Below you can see the drop in sustained write speed illustrated. The tiny bumps are the occasional jump up to 400/500MBps. The NV2 spent the majority of the time at the slower rate.

Again, I must point out that we’re talking NVMe here, which is far faster than any other type of storage you’re likely to employ. But within those boundaries, you’re definitely getting what you pay for. Or didn’t pay for, more precisely.

Should I buy the Kingston NV2?

Yes, if you’re on a tight budget and can’t afford anything else. It’s also suitable for external storage where the USB and even Thunderbolt busses aren’t fast enough to warrant a top-tier SSD.

On the other hand, definitely skip the NV2 if you’re an enthusiast or prosumer regularly writing very large amounts of data. It’s also not the optimal drive for running an operating system due to the relatively slothful 4K performance.

How we test

Drive tests currently utilize Windows 11, 64-bit running on an X790 (PCIe 4.0/5.0) motherboard/i5-12400 CPU combo with two Kingston Fury 32GB DDR5 4800MHz modules (64GB of memory total). Both 20Gbps USB and Thunderbolt 4 are integrated to the back panel and Intel CPU/GPU graphics are used. The 48GB transfer tests utilize an ImDisk RAM disk taking up 58GB of the 64GB of total memory. The 450GB file is transferred from a 2TB Samsung 990 Pro which also runs the OS.

Each test is performed on a newly formatted and TRIM’d drive so the results are optimal. Note that in normal use, as a drive fills up, performance may decrease due to less NAND for secondary caching, as well as other factors. This is less of a factor with the current crop of SSDs with their far faster NAND.

Caveat: The performance numbers shown apply only to the drive we were shipped and to the capacity tested. SSD performance can and will vary by capacity due to more or fewer chips to shotgun reads/writes across and the amount of NAND available for secondary caching. Vendors also occasionally swap components. If you ever notice a large discrepancy between the performance you experience and that which we report, by all means, let us know.

Best Prices Today: Kingston NV2 SSD

Author: Jon L. Jacobi, Freelance contributor