The Kingston KC2000 SSD Review: Bringing BiCS4 To Retail
by Billy Tallis on July 22, 2019 8:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy
Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionally more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren't enough to fill the drive, so performance never drops down to steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user's day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive's peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here. This test is run twice, once on a freshly erased drive and once after filling the drive with sequential writes.
The overall performance from the Kingston KC2000 on the Heavy test is disappointing. Its performance when full isn't quite as bad as the other drives that use recent Silicon Motion controllers with aggressive SLC caching, but the empty-drive performance is less than half what the ADATA SX8200 Pro provides. The KC2000 doesn't seem to be making tradeoffs to handle one case better than the other; it's just slow either way.
The overall average latency scores for the KC2000 on the Heavy test are worse than expected for a high-end NVMe drive and are pushing into entry-level NVMe territory. The 99th percentile latency scores are a bigger problem, since the KC2000 falls behind even mainstream SATA drives.
Breaking down the average latency scores, the KC2000 is competitive with read latency, though its read latency is a bit high when the test is run on a full drive. The average write latency scores are generally the worst among high-end NVMe drives, but are not a serious problem.
The poor 99th percentile latency scores for the KC2000 are due entirely to its behavior for writes, where it delivers worse QoS than a decent SATA drive (though not as bad as a full QLC drive). The QoS for read operations is competitive with many of the best TLC drives on the market.
The energy usage of the Kingston KC2000 over the course of the Heavy test is a little bit on the high side of normal, but isn't an outlier like the Samsung drives. Like the other two Silicon Motion drives, the KC2000's power requirements are notably higher when the test is run on a full drive, but the impact isn't quite as large on the KC2000 as it is for the ADATA drive that uses Micron NAND instead of Toshiba's 96L TLC.
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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.