The Kingston KC2000 SSD Review: Bringing BiCS4 To Retail
by Billy Tallis on July 22, 2019 8:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer
The Destroyer is an extremely long test replicating the access patterns of very IO-intensive desktop usage. A detailed breakdown can be found in this article. Like real-world usage, the drives do get the occasional break that allows for some background garbage collection and flushing caches, but those idle times are limited to 25ms so that it doesn't take all week to run the test. These AnandTech Storage Bench (ATSB) tests do not involve running the actual applications that generated the workloads, so the scores are relatively insensitive to changes in CPU performance and RAM from our new testbed, but the jump to a newer version of Windows and the newer storage drivers can have an impact.
We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, the average latency of the I/O operations, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.
The average data rate from the Kingston KC2000 on The Destroyer is slower than any of the competing drives we've tested, though the ADATA SX8200 Pro that uses the same SM2262EN controller is only slightly faster. The KC2000 is still almost twice as fast overall as the SATA and entry-level NVMe drives.
The KC2000 falls behind other high-end drives in terms of latency on The Destroyer, but the average latency is still within reason. The 99th percentile latency is several times higher than it should be.
The average read latency of the KC2000 on The Destroyer is decent and outperforms several other high-end drives. The average write latency is significantly worse than the competition, but still well ahead of the entry-level NVMe drives.
Breaking down the 99th percentile scores, the KC2000 again handles reads well, but has much higher write latency than is typical for today's high-end NVMe drives. The ADATA SX8200 Pro that uses the same controller with different NAND scores even worse for both QoS metrics.
The Kingston KC2000's energy consumption during The Destroyer makes it the most power-hungry drive out of the several here that use Toshiba/WD BiCS NAND. However, compared against the broader field, it still provides about average efficiency, comparable to the ADATA SX8200 Pro that uses the same controller but Micron NAND.
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LtGoonRush - Monday, July 22, 2019 - link
The Silicon Power P34A80 uses the same controller and NAND as the MP510, but with newer, better-performing firmware.Death666Angel - Monday, July 22, 2019 - link
Do they use custom FW or just stock Phison one? You can install 12.3 (which I think is the latest) stock Phison FW on the MP510.LtGoonRush - Monday, July 22, 2019 - link
It's stock Phison firmware, I thought Corsair didn't offer their own firmware updates for the MP510 (like many vendors) but I could be wrong. I know there's a method to flash the Phison reference firmware onto a reference drive, but I would only recommend that to the adventurous who don't mind wiping their drives.Death666Angel - Tuesday, July 23, 2019 - link
Oh, Corsair doesn't offer the newest FW by themselves, I was refering to the stock Phison one that you can flash. :) Haven't seen anyone report a brick so far and the only people who might get a wiped drive are updating from way early FW as far as I saw. But doing a FW update and not backing up is just asking for trouble, whether it be official or not.sandberg123 - Monday, August 5, 2019 - link
Actually, this will be faster than the 970 EVO in real life.Foeketijn - Monday, July 22, 2019 - link
If I were in the SSD R&D business and not working for SAMSUNG, I would be getting depressed by now.Alistair - Monday, July 22, 2019 - link
You must only be looking at The Destroyer? Too long and too read heavy? If you look at the Heavy test actually I think Adata is killing Samsung in overall performance for way less money. Just don't use the drive full that's all, easy enough to do when you can buy double the amount for the same price.TheUnhandledException - Tuesday, July 23, 2019 - link
If you have to keep the drive half empty to avoid losing performance then the effective price per usable GB is higher than the list price. I agree ADATA is a good value for the buck but I wouldn't say they are killing Samsung (or anyone else) in the heavy benchmark.Strikamos - Tuesday, July 23, 2019 - link
I'm planning on buying the Corsair MP510! Does it have the same problem as the ADATA? Loosing performance when full.. Thank youDeath666Angel - Tuesday, July 23, 2019 - link
Every consumer SSD ever loses some performance when 100% full. Some are better (overprovisioning from the factory, SLC, MLC, TLC, QLC, TRIM, garbage collection, write amplification, wear leveling etc.) than others. TLC with SLC caches (which is the norm and great bang/buck) have a smaller SLC cache the fuller the drive gets. 42GB at empty is a typical figure for 512/1TB drives I think and it gets smaller. Keeping 10% free was an often advised figure in the days of MLC and garbage collection routines. I'd stick to that or 50/100 GB depending on size. My 1 TB system SSD has between 50 and 150GB free and I don't want to go below 50GB free. Things have generally become much better and if you run consumer workloads you will hardly notice a difference going nearly full.