The Kingston KC2000 SSD Review: Bringing BiCS4 To Retail

AnandTech Storage Bench - Light

Our Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it's by far the shortest test overall. It's based largely on applications that aren't highly dependent on storage performance, so this is a test more of application launch times and file load times. This test can be seen as the sum of all the little delays in daily usage, but with the idle times trimmed to 25ms it takes less than half an hour to run. Details of the Light test can be found here. As with the ATSB Heavy test, this test is run with the drive both freshly erased and empty, and after filling the drive with sequential writes.

The overall performance of the Kingston KC2000 on the Light test is another disappointment, since it is basically the same speed as last year's entry-level NVMe drive from Kingston that used the less powerful Phison E8 controller and an older generation of Toshiba NAND. The KC2000 handles a full drive better than other recent Silicon Motion drives, but even in that worst-case scenario it's still substantially slower than most high-end NVMe drives.

The average latencies from the KC2000 during the Light test are a bit high compared to most high-end drives, but it's quick enough to not be a problem for lighter workloads. The 99th percentile latency is fine when the Light test is run on an empty drive, but when the drive is full it starts to stutter more than a decent SATA drive.

Splitting the average latencies by reads and writes, we see that both write latency scores for the KC2000 are a bit on the slow side for something aspiring to be a high-end drive, while the read latency is very competitive for the empty-drive test run and only falls a bit behind when the drive is full.

Breaking down the 99th percentile latency scores reveals where the KC2000 really gets into trouble: when dealing with a full drive and the unavoidable pressure of background work, the KC2000's read QoS suffers with 99th percentile read latencies jumping to several milliseconds—close to hard drive seek times. This is a known issue for the Silicon Motion SM2262EN controller, which doesn't seem to be very good at interrupting background work to quickly handle more important reads. Fortunately, the 99th percentile write latency is nowhere near as bad as we've seen from drives like the ADATA SX8200 Pro.

The Kingston KC2000 doesn't win any prizes for energy efficiency during the Light test. When the test is run on an empty drive the energy usage is decent but like the other Silicon Motion drives it gets more power hungry when the drive is full and there's more background work to be done. Even in that case, it is more efficient than Samsung's drives, which burn a lot of power to offer performance that simply doesn't matter on a light workload like this test.