Kingston's blazing-fast KC3000 1TB NVMe SSD is down to £94 at CCL
£75 off its UK RRP for one of the fastest PCIe 4.0 drives.
Kingston are one of the few companies that make their own SSDs rather than rebadging someone else's, and their latest content-creation focused drive is the KC3000. This PCIe 4.0 SSD offers sequential reads up to 7000MB/s and sequential writes up to 6000MB/s, making it one of the very fastest drives available, and today it's also one of the cheapest. That's because CCL have discounted the drive to £94.27, some £75 below its UK RRP and a terrific deal for a drive with these high-end specs.
I use this drive in the Digital Foundry CPU/GPU test rig, and it's proven extremely potent. Obviously the high sequential speeds make it ideal for working with large files, like 4K video files, but its random I/O performance is also impressive. It's rated for up to one million IOPS for both reads and writes, the same as the best gaming SSDs, and therefore offers extremely rapid performance in a wide range of scenarios - perfect for eliminating storage-related in-game stutters and minimising load times.
The KC3000 also comes with a five year warranty and a high rated lifetime of 800TBW (terabytes written) - definitely on the upper end for a 1TB SSD; the WD SN850 has only 600TBW for context. This makes sense for a drive geared towards creators, and helps to make the drive a strong long-term investment.
To take full advantage of the speeds on offer, you'll need to have a system capable of PCIe 4.0 or higher, which requires a recent motherboard and processor. On the motherboard side, you'll want one ofAMD's 500-series boards (B550, X570) and Intel's 500-series boards (Z590, H570, B560), or later. (Some Intel X490 boards also have PCIe 4.0 support with the correct CPU installed, but this may require a beta BIOS.) You'll also need a CPU that supports PCIe 5.0, so Ryzen 3000 and beyond or Intel 11th-gen and beyond. If you're not sure where your system lies, just Google the name of the processor/motherboard and "PCIe 4.0" and you should get some useful results!
So: £94 is an awesome price for one of the fastest SSDs on the planet, so do pick one up while they're still available. Thanks for joining me and we'll see you again next time for more dealz!