Kingston KC2000

PRICE £156 (1TB) WEBSITE www.kingston.com

Kingston is a well-known name in both flash storage and memory products. In addition to consumer SATA and NVME SSD drives, they also ship a wide range of SD cards, embedded storage and SSDS that are aimed at data centre use.

Not to mention they’ve been in the memory (RAM) business for decades as well, although much of Kingston’s consumer memory is now under the wing of sister brand Hyperx, plus a range of gaming peripherals.

Kingston isn’t launching a PCIE 4.0 SSD just yet though. So we’re reviewing KC2000, which is the firm’s fastest PCIE 3.0 consumer SSD at the time of writing. It’s a nifty drive, based on 96-layer TLC NAND, with capacities ranging from 250GB to 2TB. As with the other drives, it’s the 1TB version on test.

But before sending it in for review, Kingston was very keen to clarify that its replacement, a new flagship KC2500 model, is due for launch around the time this issue of 3D World will be in your hands. So be aware that whatever performance results we see, the KC2500 will almost certainly be faster.

And it seems a refreshed model might be due, because in some tests the KC2000 slightly lags behind some of the other SSDS. While its 600TBW endurance matches the other PCIE 3.0 drives, and it delivers rock-solid 3,230 MB/S burst read performance in Crystaldiskmark, its 350K/275K IOPS and 2,796 MB/S write speeds fall slightly behind, as did its overall scores in the AS SSD test, beating only the ADATA SX8200 Pro.

However, file copy tests in AS SSD were much better, closer in speed to the other drives than raw benchmark results might indicate, and the gap was similarly narrow with results for compressed data.

And as of writing, the KC2000 has another small advantage, as it’s currently one of the most affordable drives of the six we tested. We found the 1TB version online for just £156 (Scan Computers), which is currently a bargain for an NVME SSD of this capacity, roughly 15 per cent cheaper than other PCIE 3.0 SSDS.

If you’re planning on spending big bucks on a workstation build, that saving is a small drop compared with the four-figure sums you’ll be spending on high-end graphics cards. But if you’re on a limited budget and want great NVME storage performance for a low price, opting for KC2000 could be a great way to plough some savings into other components.

VERDICT