Review: Kingston PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2

What’s on board?

The Kingston NV2 is a solid state drive that has recently caught the attention of many tech enthusiasts since its launch on September 7th, 2022. With its compact, single-sided M.2 2280 form factor (22x80mm), the NV2 is available in 25g Gb, 500Gb, 1 TB and 2 TB capacities. The design is fairly simple, with all its memory on one side, which is beneficial for cooling and is svelte enough for a slimline laptop or small form factor PC compatibility. The whole family boasts impressive performance and reliability.

The Kingston NV2 SSD interfaces with the rest of your preferred system using a PCI-Express 4.0 x4 connection, taking advantage of this super-fast interface to deliver excellent performance. The SSD is equipped with the SM2267XT controller from Silicon Motion, while the 144-layer QLC NAND flash chips are made by Intel.

Just as an aside it’s worth noting that the NV2 is sold in multiple variants with different NAND flash or controller, (just as many other manufacturers do) so potentially your specific performance may differ from mine.

I fitted the drive into our Gigabyte Aurus gaming pc without any difficulty at all, it just slotted in and screwed down with little to no effort. The drive appeared in windows on boot up and we were off to the races! Later in the test we whipped out the existing boot drive and tested installing Windows 11 on the NV2 and the whole process was fast and silky smooth with no software or hardware issues – it all just worked fast, and first time!

Little Speedster

The NV2 offers a read speed of up to 3,500MB/s and a write speed of 2,800MB/s, which is impressive for a budget SSD. While it offers good sequential performance, it is not as impressive as some Gen 3 drives for gaming workloads. However, real-world performance will always vary depending on file type, sizes, and combinations of components. In my testing, the NV2 performed well for tasks an everyday user may need it for, but the lack of onboard DRAM cache does hold it back for demanding read-write tasks. Saying that, the NV2 does have a 561Gb SLC Write Cache which will give you a boost…

I haven’t noticed any thermal issues in use at all which would have been entirely unsurprising due to its single-sided, chip-packed nature.  If you do notice any heat-related problems because of your specific set up or you suffer from some of the tech-related paranoia that most of us who deal with this stuff every day have, you could easily and cheaply use a third-party heatsink to cure it…

User Feedback

A quick scan of user stories online shows that most buyers seem to appreciate the NV2’s affordability and find it sufficient for their needs. Generally, users have found it to be a good value for money, especially for users who don’t require high-end performance. These users appreciate the drive’s affordability and see it as a good option for budget builds, secondary storage, or for tasks that don’t demand high SSD performance. And, while not the longest warranty we’ve seen, users are still liking the 3-year safety net that Kingston promises.

The Upshot…