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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RSAUser - Monday, July 22, 2019 - link
As stated in the conclusion, overpriced, especially at 1TB if matching the 970 Evo Plus which has way better performance.High end pricing does not work with lower middle of the pack performance.
sircolby45 - Monday, July 22, 2019 - link
I agree...This drive is way overpriced. Does Kingston think it is actually going to sell at that price point? You are much better off with the ADATA drive or the Corsair MP510 IMO. (As well as the plethora of other similar spec'd/priced drives)bug77 - Monday, July 22, 2019 - link
Actually, this will be faster than the 970 EVO in real life.DigitalFreak - Monday, July 22, 2019 - link
Considering the 970 EVO is very close to the 970 EVO Plus in performance, I don't see that happening.bug77 - Tuesday, July 23, 2019 - link
That's because you're looking at sequential speeds. SSDs are bottlenecked by their 4k random reads and there this drive does better then Samsung.FunBunny2 - Tuesday, July 23, 2019 - link
"SSDs are bottlenecked by their 4k random reads"in general, I'd have agreed 5 years ago when app storage still leaned toward RDBMS, even sqlite. these days developers are content to read the whole file, just because seq is so much faster than spinning rust.
patrickjp93 - Thursday, July 25, 2019 - link
It still holds true, and as someone who contributes to Postgres and Norio (which is 4x as fast as SQL Server), random is still king. There are a lot of bloom filters and hash functions sitting in front of it all to prevent excessive I/O, but the bottleneck is still very much the random 4K read.DeepLake - Monday, July 22, 2019 - link
I think you have mistaken 970 with 860. This Kingston SSD will be better than 860, yes. But thats about it. 970 evo plus is way better and way more expensive, atleast where i live. HP EX950 is in the same price range as KC2000, but HP performs much much better. So in the end i agree that Kingston is very overpriced.inmytaxi - Friday, July 26, 2019 - link
How do you know that high end pricing won't work with lower middle of the pack performance? Data?kobblestown - Monday, July 22, 2019 - link
Why is Corsair MP510 not among the contenders? It has three times the endurance (1700TBW for the 960GB model), better (I think) performance and probably lower price.