Kingston NV2

Cheap but not cheerful, bemoans Shane Downing.

- Shane Downing

The Kingston NV2 is one of those SSDs that is simply too good to be true. The price is exceptional, especially at 2TB, and it is sold as a PCIe 4.0 drive. Yet it has no definitive hardware inside and its performance for both of our samples is distinctly bottom of the barrel. It also runs a little hot and inefficiently in our testing.

The NV2 follows Kingston's previous NV1, a drive very much in line with Kingston's philosophy of providing cheap drives at scale. The NV2 is similar in that it uses a hodge-podge of hardware - different controllers and NAND flash from drive to drive offered at an insanely low price. The Kingston NV2 is available in 250GB, 500GB, 1TB and 2TB flavours.

The drive can manage up to 3,500MB/s and 2,800MB/s for sequential read and write, respectively, but has no random performance specifications. This makes sense because it can utilise more than one controller and more than one type of flash. The sequential write specifications are such that it can only have QLC at 1TB and 2TB, however. The sequential values are low for a PCIe 4.0 drive for a good reason: Kingston set them for the weakest possible controller and flash.

The NV2 has a three-year warranty and can manage 320TB of writes per TB capacity. This is exactly as expected for a budget drive.