Kingston KC1000 480 GiB SSD Review

The Kingston KC1000 480 GiB

Figure 1 shows the box of the Kingston KC1000 480 GiB. There are two versions available: only the M.2 card, or with an adaptor to be installed on a conventional PCI Express x4 (or x16) slot.

Figure 1: package

As you see in Figure 2, the model we tested comes with a PCI Express slot adapter, which must be used if your motherboard doesn’t come with an M.2 slot compatible with PCI Express 3.0 x4 bus. The package also includes an adapter to use with slim cases and the serial code for the Acronis True Image program, which allows to copy all the content of a drive to another oner.

Figure 2: package contents

On Figure 3, we see the Kingston KC1000 480 GiB removed from the adapter.

Figure 3: the Kingston KC1000 480 GiB

On the bottom of the PCB (solder side,) there are four flash memory chips and one DDR3 SDRAM chip that works as a cache.

Figure 4: bottom side

Removing the sticker, we see the component side of the PCB. Here you see the controller chip, more four flash memory chips and one more cache memory chip.

Figure 5: component side of the PCB

The controller chip used by the KC1000 is the Phison PS5007-E7, seen in Figure 6.

Figure 6: Polaris controller chip

The Kingston KC1000 uses two DDR3L-1600 Kingston D2516EC4BXGGB chips as cache memory. Each chip has 512 MiB of capacity.

Figure 7: buffer memory chip

The eight flash memory chips are Toshiba TH58TFG9DFLBA8C.

Figure 8: flash memory chip