The Kingston KC2000 SSD Review: Bringing BiCS4 To Retail
by Billy Tallis on July 22, 2019 8:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Light
Our Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it's by far the shortest test overall. It's based largely on applications that aren't highly dependent on storage performance, so this is a test more of application launch times and file load times. This test can be seen as the sum of all the little delays in daily usage, but with the idle times trimmed to 25ms it takes less than half an hour to run. Details of the Light test can be found here. As with the ATSB Heavy test, this test is run with the drive both freshly erased and empty, and after filling the drive with sequential writes.
The overall performance of the Kingston KC2000 on the Light test is another disappointment, since it is basically the same speed as last year's entry-level NVMe drive from Kingston that used the less powerful Phison E8 controller and an older generation of Toshiba NAND. The KC2000 handles a full drive better than other recent Silicon Motion drives, but even in that worst-case scenario it's still substantially slower than most high-end NVMe drives.
The average latencies from the KC2000 during the Light test are a bit high compared to most high-end drives, but it's quick enough to not be a problem for lighter workloads. The 99th percentile latency is fine when the Light test is run on an empty drive, but when the drive is full it starts to stutter more than a decent SATA drive.
Splitting the average latencies by reads and writes, we see that both write latency scores for the KC2000 are a bit on the slow side for something aspiring to be a high-end drive, while the read latency is very competitive for the empty-drive test run and only falls a bit behind when the drive is full.
Breaking down the 99th percentile latency scores reveals where the KC2000 really gets into trouble: when dealing with a full drive and the unavoidable pressure of background work, the KC2000's read QoS suffers with 99th percentile read latencies jumping to several milliseconds—close to hard drive seek times. This is a known issue for the Silicon Motion SM2262EN controller, which doesn't seem to be very good at interrupting background work to quickly handle more important reads. Fortunately, the 99th percentile write latency is nowhere near as bad as we've seen from drives like the ADATA SX8200 Pro.
The Kingston KC2000 doesn't win any prizes for energy efficiency during the Light test. When the test is run on an empty drive the energy usage is decent but like the other Silicon Motion drives it gets more power hungry when the drive is full and there's more background work to be done. Even in that case, it is more efficient than Samsung's drives, which burn a lot of power to offer performance that simply doesn't matter on a light workload like this test.
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LtGoonRush - Monday, July 22, 2019 - link
The Silicon Power P34A80 uses the same controller and NAND as the MP510, but with newer, better-performing firmware.Death666Angel - Monday, July 22, 2019 - link
Do they use custom FW or just stock Phison one? You can install 12.3 (which I think is the latest) stock Phison FW on the MP510.LtGoonRush - Monday, July 22, 2019 - link
It's stock Phison firmware, I thought Corsair didn't offer their own firmware updates for the MP510 (like many vendors) but I could be wrong. I know there's a method to flash the Phison reference firmware onto a reference drive, but I would only recommend that to the adventurous who don't mind wiping their drives.Death666Angel - Tuesday, July 23, 2019 - link
Oh, Corsair doesn't offer the newest FW by themselves, I was refering to the stock Phison one that you can flash. :) Haven't seen anyone report a brick so far and the only people who might get a wiped drive are updating from way early FW as far as I saw. But doing a FW update and not backing up is just asking for trouble, whether it be official or not.sandberg123 - Monday, August 5, 2019 - link
Actually, this will be faster than the 970 EVO in real life.Foeketijn - Monday, July 22, 2019 - link
If I were in the SSD R&D business and not working for SAMSUNG, I would be getting depressed by now.Alistair - Monday, July 22, 2019 - link
You must only be looking at The Destroyer? Too long and too read heavy? If you look at the Heavy test actually I think Adata is killing Samsung in overall performance for way less money. Just don't use the drive full that's all, easy enough to do when you can buy double the amount for the same price.TheUnhandledException - Tuesday, July 23, 2019 - link
If you have to keep the drive half empty to avoid losing performance then the effective price per usable GB is higher than the list price. I agree ADATA is a good value for the buck but I wouldn't say they are killing Samsung (or anyone else) in the heavy benchmark.Strikamos - Tuesday, July 23, 2019 - link
I'm planning on buying the Corsair MP510! Does it have the same problem as the ADATA? Loosing performance when full.. Thank youDeath666Angel - Tuesday, July 23, 2019 - link
Every consumer SSD ever loses some performance when 100% full. Some are better (overprovisioning from the factory, SLC, MLC, TLC, QLC, TRIM, garbage collection, write amplification, wear leveling etc.) than others. TLC with SLC caches (which is the norm and great bang/buck) have a smaller SLC cache the fuller the drive gets. 42GB at empty is a typical figure for 512/1TB drives I think and it gets smaller. Keeping 10% free was an often advised figure in the days of MLC and garbage collection routines. I'd stick to that or 50/100 GB depending on size. My 1 TB system SSD has between 50 and 150GB free and I don't want to go below 50GB free. Things have generally become much better and if you run consumer workloads you will hardly notice a difference going nearly full.