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 KC2000 review. This solid-state drive has been on the market for almost a year now, so why is the review so late? Kingston sent me the KC2000 last year, but during testing, I discovered that the drive has issues with 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. This is the exact same issue that plagued my HP EX950 sample, which they fixed within a few days.

Internally, the Kingston KC2000 uses a Silicon Motion SM2262ENG controller paired with Toshiba 96-layer TLC flash. Two 512 MB DDR3-1866 DRAM chips provide 1 GB of storage for the mapping tables of the SSD.

Kingston's KC2000 SSD is available in capacities of 250 GB ($64), 500 GB ($110), 1 TB ($186), and 2 TB ($370). Endurance for these models is set to 150 TB, 300 TB, 600 TBW, and 1200 TB respectively. Kingston provides a five-year warranty for the KC2000.