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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Strikamos - Tuesday, July 23, 2019 - link
Thank you for the reply @Death666Angel. It will be my main storage, will have the Operating System running and I'll be doing video editing and rendering.I was looking for 2TB options and wanted to stay away from the Samsungs because of my budget. The Corsair MP510 and the ADATA seemed to be the best options available.
patrickjp93 - Thursday, July 25, 2019 - link
more like 1/4 over-provisioned, so the math still very much favours Adata and more of them unless your power bill are something fierce or your system density is a key priority.Foeketijn - Tuesday, July 23, 2019 - link
I didn't mean they are unbeatable. More like, the 970's are already a year on the market and still beat this latest and greatest kingston SSD with their "budget" offering.eastcoast_pete - Monday, July 22, 2019 - link
Thanks Billy! One suggestion: Show price-performance ratios for the key parameters. Yes, most of us would love to have a 1.5 or 2 TB Optane SSD in our "if I won the lottery " system, but that is just not the real world. Any chance of such a rating, even as a summary score of sorts?Kristian Vättö - Monday, July 22, 2019 - link
SSD pricing, and all memory (DRAM/NAND) for that matter, is too dynamic to make such graph useful. Tomorrow's price might be totally different, not to forget pricing in different stores, regions, sales etc.erinadreno - Wednesday, July 24, 2019 - link
Is that just me or there's too many NAND packages for 1 TB drive?sjkpublic@gmail.com - Thursday, July 25, 2019 - link
2TB write endurance 1200 TB? 600 writes and it heads south? Misprint?patrickjp93 - Thursday, July 25, 2019 - link
That's just what they guarantee it to. It's corporate butt covering.Death666Angel - Sunday, July 28, 2019 - link
The Samsung 840 500GB SSD (first TLC drive with "the bug") I used as a system drive for 5 years had only 12TB TBW to it. And I do like to install windows every once in a while and I rotate a lot of my steam library. I did have a separate 750GB download HDD for videos and large images. But honestly, if 1.2PB writes seem small to you, what are you doing looking in the consumer review section? :D