Review Verdict: The Kingston NV1 delivers excellent performance for what you pay for, and is a great choice for anyone in the Philippines looking to get fast NVMe storage at a low price. The only kicker here is the fact that it has a lower lifespan VS other products offered by the brand, which may or may not be a concern depending on where you intend to use the drive.

Pros

• Relatively affordable
• Good performance despite the lower price

Cons

• Lower overall endurance VS Kingston’s other products
• DRAM-less design

Upgrading to a faster, NVMe SSD is usually a cost-effective solution to wring out more performance on an older PC or new rig, though most people are usually limited to lower capacities because of cost. Kingston’s new NV1 NVMe is affordable enough that you can grab a 1TB stick without the cost of ruining your bank account, at the cost of the stick’s longevity.

Design and features

Unlike Kingston’s more expensive NVMe offerings like the KC2500, we weren’t able to get a solid pin on the specifics of the components used on the NV1 like the microcontrollers or NAND flash memory used on the line. Anandtech theorizes that the brand mixes and matches both NAND and microcontrollers available on the market together to hit the price point they’re targeting.

Instead, Kingston only provides specifics on sequential read and write performance for the drive (which is 2100/1700MB/s respectively), as well as overall drive endurance for the specific storage capacity you buy.

Take note that Kingston isn’t confirming that that’s the case here – but it’s more than likely that’s what’s happening, considering the brand is more than willing to divulge said specifics on their more expensive lineup.

One other thing to take note of here is the fact that the NV1 is a DRAM-less NVMe, which explains its lower cost VS other offerings in the market.

To put it simply, DRAM on SSDs is the part responsible for telling programs where in the drive a specific piece of data is, acting like a map of the information stored in the physical drive. While SSDs can function without DRAM, a DRAM-less drive usually is slower than one that has it.

One other thing to note is that since the program now has to look on the NAND memory itself for data (NAND being the actual part of the NVMe that holds data) there’s more wear and tear on the drive, which typically means lower overall service life VS one with DRAM.

As for looks, well, it looks like your typical NVMe drive. It ships in a package similar to the brand’s affordable A2000 line, and should fit anywhere a typical NVMe could.

Performance

Time to look at the numbers: the Kingston NV1 comes pretty close to its advertised read speeds, and goes over its write speeds in our tests.

It comes close to the A2000’s read/write performance, though obviously, the omission of DRAM hurts it a little.

As far as performance goes though, it performs faster than a regular 2.5-inch SSD and blows regular HDDs out of the water. This is Kingston’s intended purpose for the NV1, and in this context, the drive does its job well.

The biggest drawback of the NV1 isn’t its performance – it is its potential longevity. One of the things that tell us that the NV1 is a DRAM-less drive is its lower Total Bytes Written (TBW) figure. TBW is a number that denotes a drive’s overall longevity, measured in terabytes. The NV1 has a TBW of 240 TBW for the 1TB version and 120 TBW for the 500GB variant. To put that in perspective, Kingston’s own A2000 NVMe has a TBW of 600 for the 1TB version and 350 for the 500GB variant.

The lower TBW numbers also explain the lower 3-year limited warranty on the NV1 VS the 5-year warranty on the A2000.

That’s not to say that the NV1 is slated to fail after 3 years, it likely won’t – but it is going to fail faster than say, something that has a higher TBW number subjected to the same conditions.

Wrap-up and verdict

Our Kingston NV1 review shows the potential tradeoffs that you’re getting when opting for the brand’s more affordable NVMe SSD drive VS more expensive options, at least in the Philippines.

Yes, you are getting more from your buck, though take note that the tradeoff for the lower price is slightly lower warranty coverage and potentially lower overall service time.

You’ll have to take a look at your options – if you need something more reliable in the long run, you might want to pony up for a more expensive model.

The NV1 is also a good drive if fancy making your own NVMe enclosure. It’s affordable enough that you can buy the 1TB variant and stick it into an enclosure like the ROG Strix Arion without having to worry about overall reliability.

Kingston NV1 Review Philippines Price

• • SNVS/500G – 500GB – Php 3,050
  • SNVS/1000G – 1TB – Php 5,475
  • SNVS/2000G – 2TB – Php 10,550