Kingston A1000 NVMe M.2 480GB SSD Review

Kingston A1000 NVMe M.2 480GB SSD Review

Introduction

It doesn’t feel that long ago that we spent an inordinate amount of time convincing the naysayers that Solid State Drives really were worth the money and could revolutionise your system. There was a massive swell of people who didn’t understand, especially given the huge price per GB cost of the first wave of SSDs. Thankfully those days are past and even the most militant luddites accept the benefits that faster storage bring.

As with all technologies it didn’t take very long for the manufacturers to fully saturate the SATA III bandwidth possibilities and by the second generation even the basic models from lesser manufacturers could bump up against the bandwidth limit. Enter Intel and NVMe. NVMe standing for Non-Volatile Memory Express, utilising the PCI Express bandwidth to take storage speeds into the stratosphere.

Because we can never have too much of a good thing – in this case storage speeds – there has been a move amongst enthusiasts to replicate the old SSD for OS and HDDs for storage setups of old, except this time with an M.2 for the operating system and the now-affordable SSDs as the data devices. This does entail a huge level of investment as NVMe M.2 drives haven’t been around long enough for them to become truly affordable to the masses.

Kingston have sought to fix this problem with the release of the A1000 NVMe M.2 drive, a truly affordable option so that the M.2 slot on your modern motherboard no longer feels lonely and unloved like a Thunderbolt port, but can feel appreciated like USB 3.0. With a price tag akin to a big brand SSD, does the A1000 bring enough performance to the party, or have Kingston had to cripple it too much to make it affordable?

Technical Specifications

There are three size options with the A1000 and we’ve got the 480GB model in for review. This hits the price/performance sweet spot we feel, whilst also ensuring you don’t need to be too picky about which applications you install and could even put a few games on it, should you have a particularly bandwidth heavy title (usually Open World games).

Kingston A1000 NVMe M.2 480GB SSD Review Â