Kingston KC1000 960GB PCIe M.2 Solid State Drive Review

Final Thoughts
Kingston does have a really good drive in the KC1000. All of the Phison E7-based drives we’ve test this year have been really good and almost all of them we could recommend. The Kingston drive does stand out because it can be had as a normal M.2 drive for a motherboard with an PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 slot or in a PCIe card for older systems or if you wanted a secondary M.2 drive. Kingston is only charging you a $10 premium for the PCIe version of the card.

When it comes to performance Kingston quotes this drive (960GB version) at having sequential read and write speeds of 2700 MB/s and 1600 MB/s respectively. In ATTO Disk Benchmark the drive gave us 2982 MB/s read and 2317 MB/s write. In CrystalDiskMark we saw scores of 2890 MB/s read and 2279 MB/s write. So we are definitely seeing speeds even above the advertised speeds.

One issue you might run into with this drive is going to be heat. Even at idle the drive sits at 54C, and in our sustained write test it went all the way up to 93C! That is one hot drive! Being so hot causes the drive to throttle. We tested the drive normally and then with an M.2 cooler and in the AIDA64 linear write test it scored an average speed of 343.3 MB/s without a cooler and 1323.3 MB/s with a cooler. So if you plan to do any type of sustained writes I would suggest getting an M.2 cooler. Luckily many new motherboards do come with them.

Kingston offers this drive in 240GG, 480GB, and 960GB versions. The 960GB version that we reviewed today is selling at our favorite online retailer for 484.99, and Kingston does back the drive with a 5-year warranty. Overall ThinkComputers give the Kingston KC1000 960GB PCIe M.2 Solid State Drive an 8 out of 10 score.

rating8 10

Pros:
– The fastest Kingston drive we’ve tested to date
– Small form factor
– Easy to install
– 5-year warranty

Cons:
– Runs hot and can cause thermal throttling

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