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.

Packaging

The Drive

The drive uses the M.2 2280 form factor, which makes it 22 mm wide and 80 mm long.


Like most M.2 NVMe SSDs, the Kingston A2000 connects to the host system over a PCI-Express 3.0 x4 interface.


On the PCB, you'll find the controller, four flash chips, and one DRAM chip.

Chip Component Analysis

The Silicon Motion SM2263 is a four-channel flash controller with support for NVMe 1.3, TLC, and DDR3/DDR4 memory.


The four flash chips are Micron 96-layer 3D TLC NAND. NW952 decodes to MT29F2T08EMHBFJ4-R:B. Each chip has a capacity of 256 GB.


A Kingston DDR3L-1866 chip provides 1 GB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables.