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The latest drive to join Kingston's stable of SSDs is the KC600, a SATA based 2.5in drive that features a four-channel controller and 96-layer 3D TLC NAND.
The Kingston KC600 line-up comprises three capacities (at the time of writing), the entry 256GB model, 512GB and 1TB (the drive we are reviewing here). Arriving very soon will be a fourth, 2TB flagship model. At the heart of the drive is a four-channel Silicon Motion SM2259 controller which looks after Micron 96-layer 3D TLC NAND. The drive comes with XTS-AES 256-bit hardware encryption, TCG Opal and eDrive support to help keep your data secure.
Kingston rate the KC600 with up to 550MB/s and 520MB/s for Sequential read/writes respectively for the 512GB, 1TB and 2TB models. The 256GB drive has the same read performance but writes at 500MB/s. Random 4K performance is listed at up 90,000 IOPS for reads and 80,000 IOPS for writes.
Power-wise the drive is rated as 0.06W idle, 0.2W average and a maximum of 1.3W for reads and 3.2W for writes.
Kingston state that the TBW endurance figure for the 1TB drive is 600TB and back the drive with a 5-year warranty.
Physical Specifications:
- Usable Capacities: 1TB.
- NAND Components: Micron 96-layer 3D TLC NAND.
- NAND Controller: Silicon Motion SM2259.
- Cache: 1GB DDR3L.
- Interface: Serial ATA (SATA) 6Gb/s (SATA III).
- Form Factor: 2.5in 7mm.
- Dimensions: 100.1 x 69.85 x 7mm.
- Drive Weight: 40g.
The KC600 is available as a standalone drive or as part of desktop/notebook upgrade kit. Our 1TB drive was one of the standalone versions which comes in a blister pack. Above the drive is the capacity label and above that is a box explaining how much faster than an HDD drive the KC600 is.
The back of the blister pack has multilingual marketing and warranty notes on it.
The KC600 is built on a standard 2.5in, 7mm format in a metal chassis. The two halves of the enclosure are held together by four Torx security screws one of which is hidden under the warranty sticker, so by accessing the internals of the drive you can kiss your warranty goodbye.
However once inside the drive, you can see how small the PCB is in the 1TB model.
One side of the PCB has two packages of Micron 96-layer 3D TLC NAND and the 1GB DDR3L cache IC. The other side of the PCB houses two more NAND packages and the Silicon Motion SM2259 controller.
Kingston’s SSD management software utility is simply called SSD Manager. With it, you can monitor the health of the drive and how it’s being used, check the drive’s SMART data and update the firmware as well as securely erasing the drive. You can also manage the security aspects of the drive.
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:
Intel Core i7-7700K with 16GB of DDR4-3200 RAM, Sapphire R9 390 Nitro and an Asus Prime Z270-A motherboard.
Other drives
Crucial BX100 1TB
Crucial BX200 960GB
Crucial M550 1TB
Crucial MX200 1TB
Crucial MX300 2TB
Crucial MX300 Limited Edition 750GB
Integral SVR-PRO 100 4TB
Kingston SSDNow V310 960GB
Kingston UV500 960GB
Samsung 840 EVO 1TB
Samsung 850 EVO 1TB
Samsung 860 EVO 4TB
Samsung 860 QVO 4TB
Samsung 860 PRO 4TB
SK hynix SE3010 960GB
Toshiba TR200 960GB
Ultima Pro X 960GB
Software:
Atto Disk Benchmark. 3.05.
CrystalMark 6.0.
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.
Kingston's KC600 doesn't perform that well when it comes to the random tests at deeper queue depths in CrystalDiskMark. However, the Sequential read/write results confirm Kingston's official figures of 550MB/s for reads and 520MB/s for writes for the drive.
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 customise 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.
The official Sequential performance figures for the 1TB KC600 are up to 550MB/s for reads and up to 520MB/s for writes. Our sample drive confirmed those figures when tested with the ATTO benchmark with figures of 564MB/s for reads and 519MB/s for writes.
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.
In the AS SSD test, the Kingston KC600 performed well with strong read/write scores of 458 and 506 respectively, good enough for fifth place in our results chart
IOMeter is another open-source synthetic benchmarking tool which is able to simulate the various loads placed on a hard drive and solid-state drive technology.
We test with both random read and write 4K tests, as shown above. There are many ways to measure the IOPS performance of a Solid State Drive, so our results will sometimes differ from the manufacturer’s quoted ratings. We do test all drives in exactly the same way, so the results are directly comparable.
When it comes to 4K random performance, Kingston rate the 1TB drive as up to 90,000 IOPS for reads and up to 80,000 IOPS for writes. When tested with our IOMeter 4K random test, the review drive confirmed the official ratings with reads at 91,818 IOPS and writes at 83,555 IOPS
In our throughput test, the reads peaked at the 4MB block mark at 528MB/s while writes peaked at the end of the test at 490.34MB/s, both short of the official maximums of 550MB/s and 520MB/s for read and writes respectively.
Futuremark’s PCMark 8 is a very good all round system benchmark but its Storage Consistency Test takes it to whole new level when testing SSD drives. It runs through four phases; Preconditioning, Degradation, Steady State, Recovery and finally Clean Up. During the Degradation, Steady State and Recovery phases it runs performance tests using the 10 software programs that form the backbone of PCMark 8; Adobe After Effects, Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop Heavy and Photoshop Light, Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, Word, Battlefield 3 and World of Warcraft. With some 18 phases of testing, this test can take many hours to run.
Preconditioning
The drive is written sequentially through up to the reported capacity with random data, write size of 256 × 512 = 131,072 bytes. This is done twice.
Degradation
Run writes of random size between 8 × 512 and 2048 × 512 bytes on random offsets for 10 minutes. It then runs a performance test. These two actions are then repeated 8 times and on each pass the duration of random writes is increased by 5 minutes.
Steady State
Run writes of random size between 8 × 512 and 2048 × 512 bytes on random offsets for final duration achieved in degradation phase. A performance test is then run. These actions are then re-run five times.
Recovery
The drive is idled for 5 minutes. Then a performance test is run. These actions are then repeated five times.
Clean Up
The drive is written through sequentially up to the reported capacity with zero data, write size of 256 × 512 = 131,072 bytes.
Looking at the overall picture of Kingston's KC600 PCMark 8 Consistency Test run, we can see that it wasn't exactly plain sailing for the drive. There are plenty of dips in bandwidth along the way and surprisingly although the performance started to climb in the Recovery phases, the performance soon dropped away.
PCMark 8’s Consistency test provides a huge amount of performance data, so here we’ve looked a little closer at how the KC600 performs in each of the benchmarks test suites.
Adobe Creative Cloud
For the most part, the drive really suffers in the Adobe CC part of the test. All the test traces show drops in bandwidth but none more so than the Indesign trace which is the hardest hit. Least affected appeared to be the Illustrator trace which after dropping bandwidth at the fifth Degradation phase, quickly recovered without any further dramatic loses. None of the test traces recovers well from the ordeal.
Microsoft Office
From a very low bandwidth point in the first Degradation phase, the performance recovers very well in the Word trace for the MS Office part of the test. There's another drop in bandwidth for the Word trace in the fifth Degradation test, but again the KC600 recovers well. The PowerPoint and Excel traces don't appear to suffer any real problems at all.
Casual Gaming
In the Casual Gaming test runs, the World of Warcraft and Battlefield 3 trace results mirror each other for the whole length of the test. The Battlefield 3 trace is marginally the more efficient of the two.
Just like the Consistency test, PCMark 8’s Standard Storage test also 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 KC600 showed pretty strong performance in PCMark 8's Standard Storage test particularly for the two Photoshop tests with the Photoshop Light test leading the way with 441MB/s followed by the Photoshop heavy test at 424MB/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 Kingston KC600 averaged 26,087 IOPS for the test with a performance stability of 37%.
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 following folder/file types:
- 100GB data file.
- 60GB iso image.
- 60GB Steam folder – 29,521 files.
- 50GB File folder – 28,523 files.
- 12GB Movie folder – 24 files (mix of Blu-ray and 4K files).
- 10GB Photo folder – 621 files (mix of .png, raw and .jpeg images).
- 10GB Audio folder – 1,483 files (mix of mp3 and .flac files).
- 5GB (1.5bn pixel) photo.
- BluRay Movie.
- 21GB 8K Movie demos.
- 11GB 4K Raw Movie Clips (8 MP4V files).
The KC600 had no problems dealing with our real-life file transfers, although the 99MB/s when writing the contents of the 50GB file folder to the drive is a little on the low side.
Kingston's latest 2.5in SSD is the KC600 which features a full security suite which should appeal to the business end of the market, if no-one else. The suite includes hardware-based XTS-AES 256-bit data encryption plusTCG Opal 2.0 and eDrive support. The KC600 range consists of three capacities; 256GB. 512GB, 1TB – with a fourth, flagship 2TB drive about to arrive very soon.
At the heart of the drive is a Silicon Motion SM2259 controller which looks after Micron 96-layer 3D TLC NAND. The SM2259 is a four-channel controller using a 32-bit RISC CPU that combines performance with low power consumption and supports QLC and TLC NAND. The controller uses the latest Silicon Motion NANDXtend, a proprietary ECC technology that uses LDPC hard and soft decoding as well as RAID protection, all of which enhance the P/E cycles of 3D NAND ensuring both data integrity and SSD lifespan.
Performance-wise Kingston quote Sequential read/write figures for the 1TB drive as up to 550MB/s and 520MB/s respectively. Incidentally, that 550MB/s read figure is the same across all the range as is the write speed with the exception of the 256GB drive where the figure drops to up to 500MB/s. We confirmed those figures with the ATTO benchmark, the review drive producing reads at 564MB/s with writes coming in at 519MB/s.
The official 4K random figures for the whole drive range are up to 90,000 IOPS reads and up to 80,000 IOPS for writes. We could confirm those figure under testing, the review drive producing a read performance of 91,818 IOPS with writes coming in at 83,555 IOPS.
Kingston offers the drive in two versions, standalone (like our review sample) or as part of a desktop/notebook upgrade kit. Apart from the drive, this comprehensive kit includes; 2.5” USB enclosure, 3.5” bracket and mounting screws, SATA power and data cable, 7mm to 9.5mm adapter and a download coupon for Acronis True Image HD cloning software. The upgrade kit adds around £25 to the price of a standalone drive.
We found the standalone 1TB KC600 on Box for £142.88 (inc VAT) HERE.
Discuss on our Facebook page HERE.
Pros
- Available in an upgrade kit.
- Full disk encryption support.
- 5-year warranty.
Cons
- Not the fastest SATA drive we’ve seen.
KitGuru says: The inbuilt security that the Kingston KC600 comes with will appeal to the business sector, but for the consumer space the price could be lower as the drive is in a hugely competitive and crowded part of the market.
