The Kingston KC3000 is a solid-state drive in the M.2 2280 form factor, launched in October 2021. It is available in capacities ranging from 512 GB to 4 TB. This page reports specifications for the 512 GB variant. With the rest of the system, the Kingston KC3000 interfaces using a PCI-Express 4.0 x4 connection. The SSD controller is the PS5018-E18-41 from Phison, a DRAM cache chip is available. Kingston has installed 176-layer TLC NAND flash on the KC3000, the flash chips are made by Micron. Please note that this SSD is sold in multiple variants with different NAND flash or controller, which could affect performance, the "Notes" section at the end of this page has more info. To improve write speeds, a pseudo-SLC cache is used, so bursts of incoming writes are handled more quickly. Thanks to support for the fast PCI-Express 4.0 interface, performance is excellent. The KC3000 is rated for sequential read speeds of up to 7,000 MB/s and 3,900 MB/s write; random IO reaches 450K IOPS for read and 900K for writes.
At its launch, the SSD was priced at 107 USD. The warranty length is set to five years, which is an excellent warranty period. Kingston guarantees an endurance rating of 400 TBW, a typical value for consumer SSDs.