Page 11 - Conclusion
The KC2500 1TB promises Kingston's core attributes of honest quality and reliability along with cutting-edge speed for high performance systems. Did it deliver in all aspects? I would say so. There is native hardware encryption with its XTS-AES 256-bit encryption, TCG Opal, and eDrive support, which is a rare find. Along with its 5-year warranty and good write endurance of 600TBW, this NVMe SSD is guaranteed to deliver for years to come. Of course, the excellence does not stop with its specifications on paper. The Kingston KC2500 1TB's general workload speed was great and absolutely dominated in the ultra-heavy PCMark 8 Storage Consistency test. I have never seen a solid state drive do so well in such an intense test, but the fact is it was a full 12% faster on average than the venerable Western Digital Black SN750 NVMe SSD 1TB. Interestingly, the medium workloads in Crystal Disk Mark and PassMark PerformanceTest 10's Advanced Disk Test were not its forte. This reminded me of the Seagate FireCuda 510 1TB, which exhibited similar performance characteristics. Like the FireCuda 510, I believe this is firmware-related, where the firmware still has room for better optimization. That said, the KC2500 was still generally faster than the FireCuda 510 in the medium workloads, making it hard to fault. Where the KC2500 can be faulted on is its price. For about $220 at press time, this is quite a bit more than the SN750 1TB at $150 and FireCuda 510 at $190. The KC2500 is no doubt a serious performance drive with excellent features and warranty, but costing almost 50% more than the SN750 may be a little too much.
Kingston provided this product to APH Networks for the purpose of evaluation.
Since April 30, 2007, Number Ratings have been dropped for all CPUs, motherboards, RAM, SSD/HDDs, and graphics cards. This is to ensure the most appropriate ratings are reflected without the inherent limits of using numbers. Everything else will continue using the Number Rating System.
More information in our Review Focus.
The Kingston KC2500 1TB is a serious performance NVMe SSD with native hardware encryption support.
Page Index
1. Introduction, Packaging, Specifications
2. A Closer Look, Test System
3. Benchmark: AIDA64 Disk Benchmark
4. Benchmark: ATTO Disk Benchmark
5. Benchmark: Crystal Disk Mark 6.0
6. Benchmark: HD Tach 3.0.1.0
7. Benchmark: HD Tune Pro 5.70
8. Benchmark: PassMark PerformanceTest 10
9. Benchmark: PCMark 7
10. Benchmark: PCMark 8
11. Conclusion
