The Kingston A1000 NVMe SSD Review: Phison E8 Revisited

Conclusion

The Kingston A1000 is a low-end NVMe SSD, putting it in a growing market segment but one that's still struggling to prove its relevance. Drives like the A1000 feature controllers that make sometimes substantial engineering tradeoffs to bring their costs down, preventing them from matching the performance of high-end NVMe SSDs. This puts them in a second-tier below those high-end drives, however it still leave open the possibility of significantly higher performance than mainstream SATA SSDs. To that end, the Kingston A1000 largely fails to make use of the extra headroom offered by its PCIe 3 x2 interface. There are a few benchmarks where the A1000 is far faster than a decent SATA drive like the Crucial MX500, but there are just as many situations where the A1000 ends up being slower. Overall, the A1000 is a bit faster than SATA SSDs, but not by enough to be really noticeable.

NVMe SSDs have historically been less power efficient than SATA SSDs, sacrificing efficiency to reach the highest performance levels. The Kingston A1000 and its Phison E8 controller aren't subject to that motivation for maximum performance, but neither is it trying all that hard to be efficient. The A1000 mostly hovers in the 2-3W range when busy, and with performance similar to or slightly better than typical SATA SSDs, the A1000's efficiency is roughly the same. This is very different from the Toshiba RC100, which uses the same 64L 3D TLC NAND flash memory but is thoroughly power-optimized and sets plenty of efficiency records while delivering performance that puts it in the same low-end NVMe category.

The Kingston A1000 seldom draws more than 3W under load, so at first glance it might seem like a good choice for mobile use. But Phison's NVMe power management support is still inconsistent, and that plus the lackluster efficiency under load pretty much guarantees that upgrading an existing NVMe drive to the A1000 won't improve battery life.

We previously analyzed the MyDigitalSSD SBX in our first look at the Phison E8 controller platform. The Kingston A1000 is very similar to the SBX, but reserves more spare area. This doesn't translate to increased performance often enough to justify the reduced usable capacities. Meanwhile this was also our first chance to look at a 1TB-class E8 drive. Generally, higher capacities allow for higher performance due to increased parallelism across the drive's many NAND flash dies. The A1000 shows us that the 480/512GB class drives were already keeping all four channels of the E8 controller busy, and the 960GB model often slightly under-performs the 480GB. The larger drive also draws more power and consequently turns in even lower efficiency scores.

Compared to drives using the Phison E7 controller and 15nm planar MLC, the Kingston A1000 and other Phison E8 drives are a step backward in performance. The E7 was Phison's first NVMe controller and it wasn't very successful at attaining high-end performance, but it's still in a higher performance class than the deliberately low-end E8. Thanks to their much higher performance on most tests, the E7 drives are generally also more efficient than the E8 drives, even though the E7 draws more total power under load. For anyone looking to upgrade from an E7 drive, the Phison E12 controller is on the way.

Unlike MyDigitalSSD, Kingston is not selling a 128GB Phison E8 drive, instead starting the A1000 lineup at 240GB. Kingston's prices for the A1000 are generally quite close to the MyDigitalSSD SBX, but the A1000 has slightly lower usable capacities and thus usually comes in behind the SBX in a pure price per GB comparison. Either way, the Phison E8-based drives are leading the low-cost NVMe SSD segment with lower prices than even the DRAMless Toshiba RC100 and HP EX900.

It goes without saying that the high-end NVMe SSDs with PCIe x4 interfaces and an 8-channel NAND interface produce much higher benchmark scores; the flip-side to that being however that they are only a bit faster for most real-world usage. Those flagship SSDs carry a significant price premium over the entry-level NVMe drives in almost all cases, but the occasional sale (such as the current price on the 1TB HP EX920) can bring them into competition. Consumers who are getting a NVMe drive more for the bragging rights than for the sake of real performance gains may want to overlook the low-end NVMe segment entirely and skip to drives like the Samsung 970 EVO and PRO, but users who are simply looking for a reasonable step up from SATA SSDs should seriously consider the Kingston A1000 and othe Phison E8 drives.

For 256GB and smaller capacities, Phison E8 drives like the Kingston A1000 and MyDigitalSSD SBX are currently matching mainstream SATA SSDs on price. For larger drives, products like the Crucial MX500 and WD Blue still offer a much better price per GB than any NVMe option. 1TB SATA SSDs have finally made it back down to $200, but the NVMe competitors are still closer to $300. Most consumers would be better served by going with a decent SATA drive and investing the difference in a better GPU or more RAM. Users who really need very fast mass storage for eg. video editing should skip the low-end NVMe SSDs that offer only modestly better sequential access performance than SATA drives and instead shop for the high-end NVMe drives that deliver several GB/s for reads and writes.