If you find your PC or laptop getting sluggish, there are many ways to spruce things up. Upgrading your storage using a new M.2 SSD is one of the best ways to speed up your laptop or PC. There are several players in that category and Kingston Technology is one of those at the forefront. We recently received their M.2 SSD called KC2000 for a test drive. So how did it perform? Well, read on to find out!
The Kingston KC2500 NVMe PCIe SSD, is an M.2 drive aimed at laptops, desktops, workstations and high-performance computing (HPC) systems. The Kingston KC2500 NVMe SSD comes in capacities ranging from 250GB to 2TB in a M.2 2280 form factor. The variant we received for this review, offered a storage capacity of 2TB.
As the name states, the drive leverages NVMe interface as well as 96-Layer 3D TLC NAND to hit max speeds of 3.5GB/s read and 2.9GB/s write. The drive is not only fast with decent endurance, it also has good security. The drive supports end-to-end data protection using AES-XTS 256-bit hardware-based encryption.
The SSD also allows for the usage of third party security software vendors with TCG Opal 2.0 security management solutions such as those from Symantec, McAfee, WinMagic, and so on. Random performance has also seen an increase with the KC2500. Our flagship 2TB M.2 SSD drive saw reads at up to 375,000 IOPS with writes at up to 300,000 IOPS.
To build this drive, Kingston has used 96-layer 3D TLC NAND components. You also get Silicon Motion 2262EN NAND Controller, DDR3L cache, and PCIe Gen 3.0 x4 and NVMe 1.3 as the interfaces. In terms of dimensions, the SSD drive measures 80 x 22 x 3.5mm, and weighs around 10gms.
In order to test the performance out, we installed the Kingston KC2500 on our test bed as the main storage disk. The specs of the test bed included Intel Core i9-10900K processor, Gigabyte Z490 motherboard, Gigabyte RX 5700 RT GPU, 32GB of DDR4 memory from Corsair, and Microsoft Windows 10 Professional 64-bit OS.
We also ran a few benchmarks such as Anvil Pro ATTO Disk Benchmark v2.46 and AIDA64 to gauge the real world performance of the Kingston KC2500. For read speeds on ATTO, we got 3.27 GB/s, while the write speeds recorded were 2.82 GB/s. On AIDA, we got a random read speed of 1547.3 MB/s, whole the buffered read speed clocked in at 2752.7 MB/s.
As you can see from the numbers above, the Kingston KC2500 NVMe PCIe SSD aced the tests. We also found performance difference when using power hungry applications such as video rendering suites and image manipulation applications. The company also offers a 5-year warranty.
The Kingston KC2500 (2TB) is priced at approximately $620.24 (529.99 euros). While the pricing of the Kingston KC2500 is a bit on the higher side, top-notch quality and performance do come at a price. Having said all of that, the Kingston KC2500 offers an overall blockbuster performance.
Price: $620.24 approx.
