Page 2 - A Closer Look, Test System
The Kingston KC2500 1TB, like all of the latest performance SSDs, is in the M.2 2280 format. If you are not familiar with the M.2 physical standard, M.2 2280 means it the size of the drive is 22mm by 80mm, hence its numerical designation. A sticker in front spans most of the width and length of the drive for branding purposes and contains miscellaneous information such as its certification logos, part numbers, and specifications. Some components are located on the black printed circuit board behind the sticker, which we will take a closer look at in just a moment. The Kingston KC2500 1TB works on the NVMe 1.3 logical device interface and plugs into compatible motherboards directly. Electrically, M.2 NVMe interfaces with PCIe 3.0. The KC2500 uses four lanes for up to 4000MB/s bandwidth in each direction. The specified weight is 10g.
Like many flash storage solutions we have reviewed in the past, this Kingston drive is made in Taiwan. Removing the label in question will void your five-year warranty, but there is no real reason why you need to do that, haha.
Flipping the Kingston KC2500 1TB around and you will find four flash and two memory integrated circuit chips. Two Kingston D2516ECMDXGJD 512MB DDR3L-1866 memory chips are present for a total of 1GB; they are used by the controller for system memory. The KC2500's flash memory are eight Kingston 128GB 15nm triple-level cell chips labeled FB12808UCT1-7F. These are the same flash memory chips used on the Kingston UV500 240GB. Meanwhile, the KC2500's rated write endurance is an excellent 600TBW, which equates to about 329GB per day for five years. This is the same as the Western Digital Black SN750 NVMe SSD 1TB, which is very good, but not anywhere close to the Seagate FireCuda 510 1TB at 1300TBW. The KC2500's power consumption is rated at 3mW idle, 0.2W average, 2.1W read, and 7W write. The actual usable space is 1TB, as advertised. You will see 931GB in Windows.
Taking the sticker off, and you can see what the Kingston KC2500 1TB is made from. At the heart of Kingston's KC2500 1TB is a Silicon Motion SM2262EN controller. It is an NVMe solution on the M.2 socket to overcome traditional Serial ATA bandwidth bottlenecks. Kingston's firmware gives hardware XTS-AES 256-bit encryption, TCG Opal, and eDrive support. This is the same controller found in the excellent ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro 512GB. Four more Kingston FB12808UCT1-7F flash ICs can be found on this side.
Specified at 3500MB/s read, 2900MB/s write, and up to 375,000 IOPS over NVMe 1.3 on PCIe 3.0 x4, these figures are very good. It is over six times the speed of a regular SATA 6Gb/s drive and among the fastest group of SSDs benchmarked here at APH Networks. For comparison, the ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro 1TB is rated at 3500MB/s read, 3000MB/s write, and up to 390,000 IOPS. Meanwhile, the Western Digital Black SN750 NVMe SSD 1TB is rated at 3470MB/s read, 3000MB/s write, and up to 560,000 IOPS. To see how it translates to numbers in our benchmarks, we will pit the KC2500 against the big boys of this game to see how this new flagship from Kingston steps up against some popular PCI Express-based SSDs from manufacturers like ADATA, Crucial, Patriot, Seagate, and Western Digital in the next nine pages or so.
Our test configuration is as follows:
CPU: Intel Core i7-4790K @ 4.6GHz
CPU Cooling: Noctua NH-D15S
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z97X-UD3H-BK
RAM: Patriot Viper 3 Low Profile PC3-17000 4x8GB
Graphics: Gigabyte G1 Gaming GeForce GTX 960 4GB
Chassis: Fractal Design Define R6 Blackout TG
Storage: OCZ Vector 180 240GB; Crucial BX500 960GB
Power: Seasonic PRIME Ultra Titanium 850W
Sound: Auzentech X-Fi HomeTheater HD
Optical Drive: LiteOn iHAS224-06 24X DVD Writer
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 10 Pro
Compared Hardware:
- Kingston KC2500 1TB
- ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro 512GB
- Crucial P1 1TB
- Crucial P1 500GB
- Gigabyte AORUS RGB AIC NVMe SSD 512GB
- Gigabyte M.2 PCIe SSD 256GB
- Kingston HyperX Predator PCIe 480GB
- OCZ RD400A 512GB
- OCZ RevoDrive 350 480GB
- Patriot Hellfire M.2 240GB
- Patriot P300 512GB
- Patriot Viper VPN100 512GB
- Seagate FireCuda 510 1TB
- Toshiba RC100 240GB
- Western Digital Black NVMe SSD 1TB
- Western Digital Black SN750 NVMe SSD 1TB
- Western Digital Blue SN500 NVMe SSD 500GB
- Western Digital Blue SN550 NVMe SSD 1TB
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
