Introduction

With revenue in the multi-billion dollars, Kingston is the largest DRAM and flash memory products vendor in the world. While their strongest suit is in memory modules and USB/flash card storage, they are also a major player in the SSD market.

Today, we bring you our Kingston A2000 review. We recently posted a review of the higher-end Kingston KC2000 with the latest firmware update, which showed extremely promising results. Just like the KC2000, the A2000 was affected by a bug that resulted in extremely low QD1 512K sequential mixed performance. Over the course of the following months, Kingston looked into the issue, confirmed the problem, and worked on a firmware fix. The updated firmware is finally available to the public through Kingston SSD Manager; it's basically a 1-click update.

Internally, the Kingston A2000 uses a Silicon Motion SM2263ENG controller paired with Micron 96-layer TLC flash. The SM2263 is a four-channel design, whereas the SM2262 on the KC2000 uses eight flash channels. A 1 GB DDR3L-1866 DRAM chip provides storage for the mapping tables of the SSD.

Kingston's A2000 SSD is available in capacities of 250 GB ($45), 500 GB ($71), and 1 TB ($128). Endurance for these models is set to 150 TB, 300 TB, and 600 TBW respectively. Kingston provides a five-year warranty for the A2000.