Kingston Launches A1000 Entry-Level PCIe SSDs: Phison PS5008-E8 with 3D TLC
 

Solid-state drives with a PCIe interface have become standard storage solutions for enthusiast-grade PCs these days. By contrast, gamers with budget constraints tend to buy SSDs featuring a SATA bus because of their lower price. To address such customers with something faster, SSD makers release new product families based on inexpensive controllers and NAND memory. Over the past few months, we have seen announcements of such drives from various makers, now it is Kingston’s turn to try its luck with inexpensive NVMe SSDs.

Kingston’s A1000 NVMe SSDs are based on the Phison PS5008-E8 controller (four NAND channels, LDPC, NVMe 1.2, PCIe 3.0 x2 interface, etc.) and 256 Gb BiCS 3D TLC NAND flash from Toshiba. The Kingston A1000 SSDs will come in 240 GB, 480 GB, and 960 GB configurations, thus targeting people looking forward more or less decent capacities. It is a little bit surprising not to see a 120 GB model in an entry-level SSD family, but skipping this capacity point has its rationale: Kingston avoids a race to the bottom by not competing against the cheapest SSDs with a SATA interface (something that preserves its profit margins and reserves NAND for more popular products).


Peak sequential performance of the Kingston A1000 drives is rated at up to 1500 MB/s for reads as well as at up to 1000 MB/s for writes, which is considerably higher when compared to SATA SSDs, but is substantially lower when compared to drives with a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface. As for random performance, Kingston specs the drives for up to 120K/100K read/write IOPS, which is a bit lower when compared to some competing offerings featuring the same controller and memory.

As for reliability and endurance, all the Kingston A1000 SSDs are rated for one million hours MTBF and come with a five-year warranty. The entry-level 240 GB model is rated for 150 TB TBW (to be written), whereas the 960 GB SKU is expected to handle 600 TB TBW, which equates to around 0.34 TB DWPD (drive writes per day) over five years, a rather high rating for an entry-level consumer SSD series (but naturally a bit below when compared to higher-end drives).

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12623...e8-with-3d-tlc