Kingston NV2 is a new SSD from the California manufacturer. It replaces the NV1 as the entry-level PCIe SSD line and comes with a major change, jump to Gen4.

Although the future of SSDs is passing through the news that will arrive for PCIe Gen5, their deployment will be very gradual, as they will need new Intel motherboards (Alder Lake-Raptor Lake) or a new AMD platform.

But there are still millions of older boards with SATA SSDs and even hard drives. That’s where this Kingston NV2 comes in, probably a very cheap SSD that comes to upgrade both desktops and laptops.

This is a standard format model M.2 2280 which connects to a PCIe Gen 4 x4 port. use design unilateral, which means you only put the chips on one side of the SSD. This makes it possible to reduce its thickness, consumption and heat generation, which is high for this type of solution. It doesn’t include a heatsink as standard, although you probably don’t need one.

The company doesn’t mention the controller + NAND flash combination it’s using, but it’s likely to be a Phison E19T controller along with 3D QLC NAND flash memories. Kingston promises data transfer speeds of 3,000 / 1,300 Mbytes per second sequential read/write. Very low for the upper part of Gen4, which reaches 7 GB / s, although we repeat that it is intended for the entry range.

Kingston NV2 is sold in storage capacities 250 GB, 500 GB, 1 TB and 2 TB. They are estimated to last 640 TBW (Tbytes Written) for the highest capacity drive and will come with a three-year warranty. No retail price has been given, but they should be launched at a fairly limited price, as there are much faster units on the market.