The Kingston KC2000 SSD Review: Bringing BiCS4 To Retail

AnandTech 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.