Kingston shipped me the KC2000 for review almost a whole year ago. After my initial tests I was surprised that some numbers ended up lower than expected. Sure, they were "good," but not as as high as what I would have expected given the drive's positioning on the market and the praise it got from other reviewers. After more testing it became evident that the issue is related to reading and writing large chunks of data in parallel, at low queue depth. Our sequential QD1 mixed test simulates the typical "read data, process, and write back" data flow that happens in a lot of programs. Surprisingly, that was the only test that showed less than stellar results—everything else, sequential and random IO, looked great and was suggestive of this being one of the fastest drives on the market. Most people shopping for SSDs look at sequential results only because it is here where they see the big multi-gigabyte numbers vendors are presenting in their marketing (and optimizing for).

Looking at our real-life performance numbers, things were different. While there weren't any huge slowdowns, the numbers clearly showed that the KC2000 wasn't performing as well as other drives using similar components. For example, the ADATA SX8200 Pro was 5% faster on average, which is a fairly large difference. I reached out to Kingston with my data and a test case. After a while, they confirmed the problem, but seemed a bit reluctant to fix it, probably thinking I was a crazy reviewer for bringing it up as no one would care about this obscure test. Well, fast forward a few months and HP sent me their EX950 SSD, which had the exact same issue. HP was quicker, fixing the issue and sending me their new firmware within a few days, which suddenly had their drive the fastest in our test group. I shared my data with Kingston, who finally swung into action, and the firmware update is available now. If you own a KC2000, just download the latest SSD Manager—updating your drive will only take a few minutes.

With the new firmware, the Kingston KC2000 is the fastest SSD we ever tested, even faster than the Samsung 970 Pro, HP EX950, and ADATA SX8200 Pro. The differences against these top drives are small, 1% or less when averaged. It seems the Toshiba 96-layer flash paired with the fast DDR3-1866 DRAM cache helps eke out the last bits of performance to claim the throne. The new firmware update is definitely worth it. Previously, the KC2000 was not far from much more affordable QLC-based SSDs, like the Crucial P1 and Sabrent Rocket Q. Now, it is significantly faster. One test I would like to highlight is "Steam Unpacking." If you've ever waited impatiently for a Steam game release and were sad because the preload had to be decrypted and unpacked after launch, which takes forever, the KC2000 is the best choice. It is a good deal faster than nearly all other drives, letting you play earlier than your friends.

Our testing shows that the SLC cache is quite big, sized at 150 GB (or 15% of the total capacity). This will suffice for all but the largest workloads, such as restoring a full-drive backup from a sufficiently fast source (such as another NVMe SSD, however unlikely). What's also worth mentioning is that even when the SLC cache is exhausted, write speeds remain very high and never fall below 1.4 GB/s. This is better than any other TLC SSDs we've reviewed so far. Of course, once write activity stops briefly and the SLC cache has time to flush to TLC in the background, write speeds are quickly restored to the full 2.2 GB/s.

Probably the weakest test result was our thermal testing. Since the KC2000 lacks a heatsink, it will heat up quickly when heavily loaded. Just 90 seconds into our stress test, temperatures reached 90°C, and the drive started thermally throttling. Throttling behavior is acceptable, though. Write rates are roughly cut in half, to around 1 GB/s, which is still very decent. Other drives will fall off a cliff in a similar scenario and achieve only HDD speeds. Having a proper heatsink would definitely be a nice touch, especially for enthusiasts. Maybe the heatsink could be bundled separately to retain compatibility with notebooks and some motherboards while giving desktop users the option to install it if they feel their thermals are too high.

The Kingston KC2000 1 TB is currently listed online for $185, which makes it a little bit more expensive than competing high-end options, but you're also paying for the brand name with topnotch support. I can think of several drives that should be on your shortlist. For example, the HP EX950 is pretty much just as fast, but only $150, the $35 price difference could buy you a nice heatsink. One of our favorite M.2 SSDs has been the ADATA SX8200 Pro; it's $150, too. Pricing for these drives varies quite a lot. I've seen both touch $130 just a few days ago. If you are just looking for the cheapest storage, consider the ADATA Falcon, Silicon Power P34A80 or Sabrent Rocket Q; they are all $130. That having been said, I personally feel like spending slightly more can be worth it, especially as a power user. I also feel like the Samsung 970 Pro has become more of a choice for the bragging rights than an actual option because it's simply too expensive at $322.