KINGSTON KC2500 1TB

amazon KINGSTON KC2500 1TB reviews

As a family of M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD storage drives for desktops, workstations, and high-performance computing (HPCs), the Kingston KC2500 continues the American storage company’s ambitions in the premium PCIe SSD segment.

With the proliferation of thin and light laptops or high-performance gaming desktops, NVMe PCIe SSDs are increasingly popular, gradually replacing SATA SSDs thanks to their undeniable advantages in speed and compactness. At the same time, the price is not much higher.

Kingston, an American technology company that is very familiar to users in products such as memory cards, RAM, USB … is also a name with “famous” in the SSD array. The company continuously launches various SSDs, ranging from popular to high-end, and the KC series is Kingston’s flagship in the M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD segment.

The KC2500 is the successor to the KC2000 model and is available in 250GB, 500GB, and 1TB capacities, with 2TB capacities. The KC2500 drive comes with a 5-year limited warranty with free technical support. The Kingston KC2500 version that BiaReview evaluates in this article has a capacity of 1TB, has a maximum read/write speed (sequential) of 3,500/2,900 MB/s, and random 4K read/write 375,000/300.000 IOPS, of course, 600TBW endurance.

Unboxing and design overview

If you have ever used Kingston’s memory card products, you will immediately recognize the very familiar packaging of the KC2500. Still simple white tone style, without the prominent “flowers and leaves” motifs like competitors. Even the way Kingston arranges outstanding features is a bit “naive” when there are no parameters such as maximum speed or PCIe Gen3 x4 NVMe connection standard. But simply capacity drive, warranty period, and 45X number (with a small caption next to it explaining the speed of the KC2500 is 45 times faster than… HDD 7200rpm!).

The back of the packaging is densely packed with words in all kinds of languages. Still, it only adds unimportant information as the product is packaged in Taiwan; the actual capacity may be less than 1TB. Perhaps the most valuable is that the product is designed for use with laptops and desktops, not recommended for server environments. Kingston should take care of a flagship product like this to make the packaging more attractive, attracting young users, gamers, and streamers.

Unboxing, the main character begins to appear more clearly. The black PCB board and the black and white color scheme for the stickers make the KC2500 feel professional and high-end. The important information to consider is the serial number, capacity level, voltage standard, and especially the warranty will not cover you if you remove this sticker. Standard design M.2 2280, no heat dissipation, so KC2500 is compatible with most desktop and ultra-thin laptops.

In the box, Kington included a license key of Acronis True Image HD software. Users can back up the entire old drive or some partitions to KC2500, clone the operating system, restore data previously backed up data create Windows installations from USB drives or CD/DVDs.

KC2500 has a 2-sided chip design; in the 1TB version that BiaReview experienced, the product has 8 NAND chips. Kingston has traditionally used Toshiba’s NAND memory, and it’s likely still the same Toshiba 3D TLC 96-layer BiCS4 NAND used on the KC2000 series. Located near the M.2 pin is the Silicon Motion SM2262EN controller (microcontroller).

A closer look at the backside can reveal two DDR3L DRAM chips used for the Silicon Motion SM2262EN controller. That is a high-performance 8-channel PCIe 3.0 x4 controller that supports the NVMe 1.3 protocol. Currently, many PCIe NVMe SSD manufacturers have switched to DRAMless solutions, using part of NAND memory for buffering instead of separate DRAM chips to reduce costs. However, the dedicated DRAM chip solution is still the first choice in high-end products, thanks to its high performance and durability.

Kingston also claims the KC2500 is a self-encrypting drive that supports data integrity protection, uses hardware-based 256-bit XTS-AES encryption, and enables TCG Opal 2.0 security management solutions from independent software manufacturers Symantec, McAfee, WinMagic, and others. The KC2500 also integrates Microsoft eDrive, a secure storage standard for use with BitLocker.

Benchmark performance and actual usage

As mentioned at the beginning of the article, the Kingston KC2500 1TB is announced to have a maximum read/write (sequential) speed of 3,500/2,900 MB/s, and a random 4K read/write 375,000/300.000 IOPS, 600TBW endurance.

Testing the performance of Kingston KC2500, BiaReview used the system with the following configuration:

– CPU: Intel Core i7 8700

– Motherboard: MSI Z370-A Pro

– RAM: Gskill Trident Z RGB DDR4 4x8GB 3200MHz

– VGA: Gigabyte GTX 1060 G1 Gaming 6GB

– PSU: FSP Saga 550W

Although it is not mentioned on the packaging, if you visit the Kingston website. You can download the Kingston SSD Manager software to monitor the drive health, check if there is a firmware update, check the operating temperature, the amount of space written to the drive, activating security features…

The first test is the actual data copying task. BiaReview selected two situations, including copying the folder containing the game League of Legends data with 12.2 GB with many files and subfolders different sizes and copied more than 780 JPG image files ranging in size from 2-15MB, totaling 3.87GB.

In the first scenario, the KC2500 initially clocked at 1.91 GB/s, dropping to 1.2GB/s to 850MB/s after running out of cache until the end. As for the image file copying situation, the KC2500 gives a stable speed, steadily decreasing from 2.03GB/s to 1.11GB/s.

Next is Crystal Disk Mark, one of the most intuitive, easy-to-use hard drive benchmark tools available today. That is also the application used by most hard drive manufacturers to announce their products’ read/write speed.

The results show that the sequential read and write scores of Kingston KC2500 are 3488.11 MB/s and 2759.82 MB/s, respectively, approximately equivalent to Kingston’s announcement and at a good level. Meanwhile, the random data access speed of the KC2500 is not bad, 64.63/172.59 MB/s respectively, but not outstanding either.

Next is the AS SSD benchmark software, which more accurately reflects the hard drive speed than Crystal Disk Mark because it uses incompressible data instead of compressing it to lower the speed. The overall score of the Kingston KC2500 is 4339.

AS SSD also has another tool, Compression Benchmark, which measures the hard drive data compression speed with compression levels from 0% to 100%. In theory, this ideal result should be as straight and as high as possible, indicating the controller’s stability. Kingston KC2500 “hiccups” at two levels of 37% and 70% when the write speed is significantly reduced, possibly due to cache memory, while the blue line, representing data read speed, shows high stability.

ATTO Disk Benchmark is an old but still trusted tool that allows users to monitor hard drive performance in detail in various data size options. BiaReview set the drive to access 256MB of data in this test, with file sizes from 512B to 64MB. Kingston KC2500 has the highest speed of 3.14GB/s for reading and 2.55GB/s for write.

In terms of gaming performance, SSDs are superior to traditional hard drives thanks to their high data read and write speeds, resulting in significantly reduced screen load times. The Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers benchmark is a reliable tool to measure standard screen load times down to milliseconds. In total, the Kingston KC2500 loaded all five levels in 8,868 seconds, a very impressive number.

Regarding the operating temperature, BiaReview monitors the temperature of the KC2500 with HWmonitor software when the drive performs a long benchmark test ezIOmeter. During the benchmarking process, the highest temperature that HWmonitor recorded was only 47 degrees Celsius. Still, there is information that the monitoring software declares the temperature on the flash chip, not on the controller, so that the actual temperature will be around 67 degrees Celsius. With an SSD model without a heatsink like this, that’s an acceptable number.

Summary

With what is shown, Kingston KC2500 1TB deserves to be the flagship SSD model when it comes to reading and writing speed, fast and stable data access, beautiful design with a black-tone circuit board, useful monitoring software, and large capacity. The price of the KC2500 is also very competitive, slightly lower than that of fierce competitors such as Samsung 970 Evo Plus or WD Black SN750, while the performance is almost the same.

where can you get a KINGSTON KC2500 1TB online

Kingston KC2500 1 TB Solid State Drive – M.2 2280 Internal – PCI Express NVMe (PCI Express NVMe 3.0 x4): Buy it now