Kingston KC2000 500GB SSD Review

 The Kingston A1000 M.2 NVMe - Fast, Reliable and revolutionary!

When it comes to storage drives be it larger SSDs or their smallest cousins the memory cards one name always tops the list and has become a household name in the PC industry today, Kingston! Over the year Kingston has dropped in some impressive storage devices spread over a broad area to cater to almost every segment of the market thanks to its HyperX branding that takes care of the 'gaming' division and adds the much needed bling to the products as per the demands hence balancing looks with performance.

Lately what they've lacked in is their prosumer or enthusiast grade storage drives since their top contender the KC1000 is old and dated but don't lose hope guys as Kingston just dropped in their KC2000 on the table and its loaded with the best the IT industry has to offer in terms of both hardware and software. 

 

Priced in at around $115 the KC2000 is a NVMe M.2 drive which is one of the first drives ever to be using the Toshiba BiCS4 96-layer TLC NAND over the conventional 64 layer NAND chips and is paired with the latest Silicon Image SM2262EN controller all working on the PCIe 3.0x4 interface. The drive comes in as low as 250GB and goes all the way upto 2TB which makes this drive a great option for a lot of people out there. Our sample here today is a 500GB version though and is rated at a blistering fast speed of 3000MB/s and 2000MB/s of sequential read and write speeds respectively.

Packaging and Closer Look 

Kingston has gone basic and minimalist with the KC2000 when it comes to packaging, its a drive aimed at consumers and businesses alike so  why not. The drive rests safely inside a hard black plastic shell which is inside a clear transparent clam-shell and all of this is housed inside a cardboard pack with all the vital details, specifications and company logos.

I like this approach since it doesn't give the drive any segment specific appeal yet keeps it premium and functional. Inside you get the drive seated in its own exclusive casing for added protection along with a multilingual warranty card and activation key for the Kingston cloning utility, Acronis True Image HD. Kingston SSD Manager toolbox is also included and is a great move since this product is aimed at professional workloads so having something reliable and from the manufacturer itself for monitoring your drive’s health, updating the firmware, secure erasing and even be able to adjust over-provisioning is a welcome move. The Kingston KC2000 is a 2280 form factor M.2 drive which uses a dual sided PCB layout with the NAND chips, controller and DRAM chips located on both the sides of this black PCB wafer. The interface here is a PCIe 3.0x4 NVMe 1.3 since PCIe Gen 4.0 isn't common and exists in a very small corner of the industry today so its a wise move to cater to the larger audience without blowing the price out of proportion for many. The controller here is the 8-channel Silicon Motion SM2262EN controller which is one of the fastest controllers out there today and supports 800 MT/s interface speed and NVMe 1.3 specifications. We have eight Toshiba BiCS4 96-layer TLC NAND chips here and are binned by Kingston itself hence bear the Kingston branding. Each chip is 64GB and there are eight of these in total with four sitting on either side of the PCB.

Two DRAM chips sit here for buffering purposes and are 512MB DDR3L each from Nanya working at 1600Mhz, this indicates higher & constant speeds due to parallelization but we'll find that out in our benchmark section.

Test Setup and Benchmarks

We used our usual testbench to benchmark the Kingston KC2000 500GB NVMe M.2 SSD -

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 1800X @4Ghz
Motherboard: Asus X370 Crosshair VI Hero
RAM: Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro 32GB 3200Mhz
Cooler: Custom Loop
Graphics Card: Aorus GTX 1080 Ti Xtreme Edition
Storage: Kingston A400 256GB
Secondary Storage: Kingston KC2000 500GB NVMe M.2
Power Supply: Cooler Master V1200 1200W
Case: Cooler Master H500M
OS: Windows 10 Pro 64-bit

TRIM Check

Since this is a very new SSD for us so it called for some new testing suits aswell, one such tool is TrimCheck which verifies if TRIM function on the drive is working perfectly or not.