Kingston's latest M.2 NVMe SSD aimed at desktop, workstation, and high-performance PCs is the KC2500. The drive uses a combination of a Silicon Motion controller and 96-layer 3D TLC NAND. Priced around the £190 mark for the 1TB model, what can we expect from this PCIe 3.0 SSD? As with the previous Kingston KC2000, the KC2500 product line consists of four capacities; 250GB, 500GB, 1TB (the drive we are reviewing here) and the flagship 2TB model. Just like the KC2000, the new drive uses a Silicon Motion SM2262EN controller and 96-layer 3D TLC NAND combination but there appears to some tweaking going on in the firmware of the controller as the KC2500 has faster official performance figures. The official Sequential read speed for the KC2500 is up to 3,500MB/s across all four capacities. This is an increase of 500MB/s for the 250GB and 500GB drives and 300MB/s for the 1TB and 2TB drives over the KC2000 range. Sequential write performance varies according to capacity; 250GB up to 1,200MB/s, 500GB up to 2.500MB/s (an increase of 100MB/s and 500MB/s respectively) and up to 2,900MB/s for both the 1TB and 2TB drives, an increase of 700MB/s. Random performance has also seen an increase with the KC2500. The 250GB model rises from 350,000/200,000 IOPS (read/write respectively) to 375,000 IOPS for reads and 300,000 IOPS for writes. The 500GB drive sees reads climb from 350,000 IOPS to 375,000 IOPS with writes up from 250,000 IOPS for the latest drive. At 375,000 IOPS for reads and 300,000 IOPS for writes, the 1TB sees a 25,000 IOPS increase for both. The flagship 2TB drive sees reads at up to 375,000 IOPS with writes at up to 300,000 IOPS. A self-encrypting drive, the KC2500 uses 256-bit XTS-AES hardware-based encryption to provide support for end-to-end data protection. It has Microsoft eDrive support built-in and also supports the use of independent TCG Opal 2.0 security management software from vendors including McAfee, WinMagic and Symantec. The endurance figure given for the 1TB drive is 600TBW and Kingston back the drive with a 5-year warranty. Physical Specifications: Usable Capacities: 1TB. NAND Components: 96-layer 3D TLC NAND. NAND Controller: Silicon Motion 2262EN. Cache: DDR3L. Interface: PCIe Gen 3.0 x4, NVMe 1.3. Form Factor: 2280 M.2. Dimensions: 80 x 22 x 3.5mm. Drive Weight: 10g Firmware Version: 87780100. Kingston’s KC2500 drive is packaged in a blister pack with the drive sitting in a plastic tray. Sitting under the drive is an Acronis True Image HD activation key, the software is available as a download from the Kingston website. On the top right of the cardboard backing is the drives capacity along with a panel explaining how much faster than a standard 7,200 rpm mechanical drive the KC2500 is. To the right of this is a logo displaying the fact that Kingston backs the drive with a 5-year warranty. The rear of that packaging houses some multi-lingual marketing notes. The 1TB KC2500 is a dual-sided design. Sitting under the product label that practically covers the PCB you will find the Silicon Motion SM2262EN controller and four 128GB packages of 96-layer 3D TLC NAND. The other side of the PCB is home to four more NAND packages and two 512MB DDR3L cache ICs. Silicon Motion’s SM2262EN is an 8-channel controller with an 800 MT/s interface speed supporting NVMe 1.3 specifications. It supports ONFI 4.0/3.0 and Toggle 3.0/2.0 NAND and NV-DDR3 as well as DDR3, DDR3L, LPDDR3 and DDR4 DRAM. Kingston’s SSD management utility is called SSD Manager, (version v1.1.2.6. at the time of testing the drive) It automatically detects any firmware updates as well as displaying drive status, temperatures and SMART information. It also has a page for TCG Opal and IEEE-1667 encryption settings. For testing, the drives are all wiped and reset to factory settings by HDDerase V4. We try to use free or easily available programs and some real-world testing so you can compare our findings against your own system. This is a good way to measure potential upgrade benefits. Main system: AMD Ryzen 5 3600X, 16GB DDR4-2400, Sapphire R9 390 Nitro and an MSI MPG X570 Gaming Edge Wifi motherboard Other drives Corsair Force MP510 960GB Crucial P1 1TB Kingston KC2000 1TB Patriot Viper VPR100 RGB 1TB Patriot Viper VPN100 1TB PNY CS3030 1TB Seagate FireCuda 510 1TB Samsung SSD970 PRO 1TB Samsung SSD960 EVO 1TB Samsung SSD960 EVO Plus 1TB Kioxia BG4 1TB Kioxia XG6 1TB Western Digital Black SN750 1TB Western Digital Black SN750 1TB with Heatsink Western Digital Blue SN550 1TB Western Digital Black NVMe 1TB Software: Atto Disk Benchmark 4. CrystalMark v6.0 & 7.0.0. AS SSD 2.0. IOMeter. Futuremark PC Mark 8 All our results were achieved by running each test five times with every configuration this ensures that any glitches are removed from the results. Trim is confirmed as running by typing fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify into the command line. A response of disabledeletenotify =0 confirms TRIM is active. CrystalDiskMark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using v6.0 and v7. At a deep queue depth of 32, Kingston’s KC2500 sees improvements in performance for both reads and writes over the previous KC2000 drive. Looking at the two CrystalDiskMark result screens it appears that the controller doesn't have a preference for the type of data it's being asked to work with. At a shallower QD of 1, the KC2500 sees a very small improvement in read performance over the previous KC2000 drive, however, the improvement in write performance is much more impressive. The latest version of CrystalDiskMark, version 7, includes a couple of profiles that can be used for testing – Peak Performance and Real World. The result screens for these two profiles not only display MB/s results but also IOPS and latency. Looking at the Peak Performance results for Sequential read/write performance we could confirm the official Sequential read/write figures of up to 3,500MB/s and 2,900MB/s respectively with the review drive showing reads at 3,527MB/s and 3,009MB/s for writes under testing. The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage. Kingston quotes official Sequential performance figures for the KC2500 as up to 3,500MB/s for reads and up to 2,900MB/s for writes. We couldn't quite match those maximums with the review drive when tested with the ATTO benchmark, with reads at 3,130MB/s and writes at 2,720MB/s. AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read and write tests, as well as random read and write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive. AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures. With a read score of 1724 and a write score of 1763, the KC2500 just has the edge over the KC2000 in the AS SSD benchmark. IOMeter is another open source synthetic benchmarking tool which is able to simulate the various loads placed on hard drive and solid state drive technology. There are many ways to measure the IOPS performance of a Solid State Drive, so our results will sometimes differ from manufacturer’s quoted ratings. We do test all drives in exactly the same way, so the results are directly comparable. We test 128KB Sequential read and write and random read and write 4k tests. The test setup’s for the tests are listed below. Each is run five times. 128KB Sequential Read / Write. Transfer Request Size: 128KB Span: 8GB Thread(s): 1, Outstanding I/O: 1-32 Test Run: 20 minutes per test 4K Sustained Random Read / Write. Transfer Request Size: 4KB Span: 80GB Thread(s): 4, Outstanding I/O: 1-32 Test Run: 20 minutes per test 4K Random 70/30 mix Read/Write. Transfer Request Size: 4KB Span: 80GB Reads: 70% Writes: 30% Thread(s): 4 Outstanding I/O: 2 – 32 Test Run: 20 minutes. In our own Sequential read/write tests we could confirm the official up to 3,500MB/s and 2,900MB/s for read and writes respectively with a read score of 3,534MB/s and 3,034MB/s for writes. 128KB Sequential Read Performance Compared The KC2500 performs very strongly throughout the tested queue depths, at QD2 it's the fastest 1TB class M.2 consumer drive we've tested to date. 128KB Sequential Write Performance Compared The Sequential write performance isn't as strong as the read in comparison to the other tested drives. The best performance comes at QD1, after which it slips back down the charts. Indeed at QD2 it's slower than the KC2000 but it recovers to outperform the previous drive at QDs 4 and 32 The official 4K random read performance figure for the 1TB KC2500 is up to 375,000 IOPS. Although we didn't hit the maximum figure with our 4-threaded testing, our result figure of 317,465 IOPS is pretty close. We did a quick test at a QD of 32 using 8 threads to see what the drive could do and got a result of 402,588 IOPS. 4K Random Read v QD Performance Compared At a QD of 1, where much of the everyday workloads occur, the KC2500 performs well. But as the QD deepens the drive falls back from a lot of the competition. The best 4K random write figure we got from the drive with our 4-threaded testing was 217,184 IOPS, a fair way off the official maximum for the drive of 300.000 IOPS. Once again we did a quick test at a QD of 32 and 8 threads and got a result of 392,573 IOPS, somewhat better than that official figure. 4K Random Write v QD Performance Compared At a QD of 1, the KC2500 outperforms the previous KC2000 by a fair margin. However, once the queue depth starts deepening, the drive drops below the KC2000. The drive performs well in our 70/30 read/write mix test with the performance climbing cleanly as the queue depth deepens. In our read throughput test, the KC2500 peaked at the 4MB block mark at 2,892MB/s which although a fair way back from the official maximum figure of 3,500MB/s is some 184MB/s faster than the previous KC2000 drive. Peak write throughput occurred at the 8MB block mark with the drive producing a bandwidth figure of 2,908MB/s, confirming the official maximum of 2,900MB/s. PCMark 8’s Standard Storage test saves a large amount of performance data. The default test runs through the test suite of 10 applications three times. Here we show the total bandwidth performance for each of the individual test suites for the third and final benchmark run. The KC2500 handles PCMark 8's Standard Storage test without any problems and posts some impressive bandwidth figures along the way, including over 1GB/s for both Adobe Photoshop traces. The KC2500 actually performs a little worse in the complete Storage Test than the Kingston KC2000, trailing the earlier drive by some 22MB/s. For the long term performance stability test, we set the drive up to run a 20-minute 4K random test with a 30% write, 70% read split, at a Queue Depth of 256 over the entire disk. The 1TB KC2500 averaged 91,166 IOPS for the test with a performance stability of 77%. To test real life performance of a drive we use a mix of folder/file types and by using the FastCopy utility (which gives a time as well as MB/s result) we record the performance of drive reading from & writing to a 256GB Samsung SSD850 PRO. We use the follow folder/file types: 100GB data file. 60GB iso image. 60GB Steam folder – 29,521 files. 50GB File folder – 28,523 files. 12GB Movie folder – (15 files - 8 @ .MKV, 4 @ .MOV, 3 @ MP4). 10GB Photo folder – (304 files - 171 @ .RAW, 105 @ JPG, 21 @ .CR2, 5 @ .DNG). 10GB Audio folder – (1,483 files - 1479 @ MP3, 4 @ .FLAC files). 5GB (1.5bn pixel) photo. BluRay Movie - 42GB. 21GB 8K Movie demos - (11 demos) 16GB 4K Raw Movie Clips - (9 MP4V files). 4.25GB 3D Printer File Folder - (166 files - 105 @ .STL, 38 @ .FBX, 11 @ .blend, 5 @ .lwo, 4 @ .OBJ, 3@ .3ds). 1.5GB AutoCAD File Folder (80 files - 60 @ .DWG and 20 @.DXF). The KC2500 has no problem dealing with our real-life file transfer tests with over 500MB/s write performance for over half the tests. The fastest performance, 562MB/s came when the 60GB iso was being written to the drive. To get a measure of how much faster PCIe NVMe drives are than standard SATA SSD' we use the same files but transfer to and from a 512GB Kioxia OCZ RD400: Switching over to the NVMe drive to transfer data to and from the KC2500 saw transfer speeds rocket. Seven of the transfers topped well over 2GB/s while two more topped 1GB/s. Kingston's KC2000 was the first readily available drive we saw that used 96-layer 3D TLC NAND, using it in combination with a Silicon Motion SM2262EN 8-channel controller. For the company's latest drive, the KC2500, Kingston has stuck with the same controller/NAND combination, but there appears to have been some tweaking of the controller firmware as the new drive has improved performance figures over the KC2000. Taking the 1TB drive we are reviewing as an example, the Sequential read performance has risen 300MB/s, from the 3,200MB/s of the KC2000, up to 3,500MB/s for the new drive. Incidentally, that read speed applies to all four drives that make up the KC2500 range. Sequential writes have also risen, from 2,200MB/s up to 2,900MB/s, an impressive 700MB/s improvement. We could confirm both figures for the KC2500 with own Sequential tests. Similarly, the random performance of the KC2500 gets a boost. Both reads and writes get a 25,000 IOPS increase, with read performance now up to 375,000 IOPS and writes up to 300,000 IOPS. The best we saw from the review drive using our 4-threaded tests was 317,465 IOPS for reads and 217,184 IOPS for writes. However, running a quick test at a QD of 32 and with 8 threads we saw a read figure of 402,588 IOPS with writes at 392,573 IOPS. One feature that should appeal to business users is the fact that the KC2500 is a self-encrypting drive. It uses 256-bit XTS-AES hardware-based encryption to provide support for end-to-end data protection. It has Microsoft eDrive support built-in and also supports the use of independent TCG Opal 2.0 security management software from vendors including McAfee, WinMagic and Symantec. Kingston’s SSD management utility, SSD Manager may not be as feature-rich as some of its competitors such as Samsung and WD for example, but without all the bells and whistles and funky GUI's it will automatically detect any firmware updates as well as displaying drive status, temperatures and SMART information and lets business users keep an eye on those all-important TCG Opal and IEEE-1667 encryption settings. We found the 1TB Kingston KC2500 on CCL for £187.14 (inc VAT) HERE Pros. Overall performance. Endurance. Encryption support. Cons. 4K performance at deeper queue depths. KitGuru says: Kingston's KC2000 was a cracking drive, mixing good performance with some strong security features. With the KC2500 seemingly using the same NAND / controller combination but with some tweaking, Kingston now has a drive with the same security features but even stronger performance.
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