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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RSAUser - Monday, July 22, 2019 - link
As stated in the conclusion, overpriced, especially at 1TB if matching the 970 Evo Plus which has way better performance.High end pricing does not work with lower middle of the pack performance.
sircolby45 - Monday, July 22, 2019 - link
I agree...This drive is way overpriced. Does Kingston think it is actually going to sell at that price point? You are much better off with the ADATA drive or the Corsair MP510 IMO. (As well as the plethora of other similar spec'd/priced drives)bug77 - Monday, July 22, 2019 - link
Actually, this will be faster than the 970 EVO in real life.DigitalFreak - Monday, July 22, 2019 - link
Considering the 970 EVO is very close to the 970 EVO Plus in performance, I don't see that happening.bug77 - Tuesday, July 23, 2019 - link
That's because you're looking at sequential speeds. SSDs are bottlenecked by their 4k random reads and there this drive does better then Samsung.FunBunny2 - Tuesday, July 23, 2019 - link
"SSDs are bottlenecked by their 4k random reads"in general, I'd have agreed 5 years ago when app storage still leaned toward RDBMS, even sqlite. these days developers are content to read the whole file, just because seq is so much faster than spinning rust.
patrickjp93 - Thursday, July 25, 2019 - link
It still holds true, and as someone who contributes to Postgres and Norio (which is 4x as fast as SQL Server), random is still king. There are a lot of bloom filters and hash functions sitting in front of it all to prevent excessive I/O, but the bottleneck is still very much the random 4K read.DeepLake - Monday, July 22, 2019 - link
I think you have mistaken 970 with 860. This Kingston SSD will be better than 860, yes. But thats about it. 970 evo plus is way better and way more expensive, atleast where i live. HP EX950 is in the same price range as KC2000, but HP performs much much better. So in the end i agree that Kingston is very overpriced.inmytaxi - Friday, July 26, 2019 - link
How do you know that high end pricing won't work with lower middle of the pack performance? Data?kobblestown - Monday, July 22, 2019 - link
Why is Corsair MP510 not among the contenders? It has three times the endurance (1700TBW for the 960GB model), better (I think) performance and probably lower price.