Kingston KC2500

A very capable all-rounder SSD that successfully balances cost and performance

SCORE

PRICE 1TB, £95 (£114 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/324kc2

READ SPEED 2,665MB/ SEC

WRITE SPEED 2,246MB/ SEC

Kingston’s KC2500 is one of this month’s most affordable SSDs. It’s not as cheap as the £80 WD Blue SN550, but the £34 difference translates to a performance boost – we found the KC2500’s sequential read speeds around 20% faster than the WD Blue’s, while write speeds were up by nearly 30%.

Multithreaded performance is lifted by a similar margin, which means the KC2500 should comfortably cope with any sort of workload. The PCMark 10 benchmark suite gave it a system disk score of 2,473 and a data disk score of 3,260 – indicating that it’s not only a stronger all-rounder than the WD Blue, it’s also a much better system drive than the Corsair MP400, which scored 1,030 in the same test.

The KC2500 comes in a good spread of sizes, from 250GB to 2TB, and all of them support full-disk encryption. As a nice bonus, if you cut open the cardboard packaging with care, you will find a licence key for Acronis True Image HD hidden away inside. This isn’t a full edition of the software – it’s an OEM, Windows-only build that won’t back up individual files and folders. Even so, it’s still a great help for upgraders.

Clearly there are faster SSDs on the market, and cheaper ones too. However, it’s questionable whether any other drive finds such an appealing balance between performance and price. If you’re the sort of canny consumer who likes to go for the second or third bottle on the wine list, the Kingston KC2500 might suit you perfectly.