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.

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 KC2000 connects to the host system over a PCI-Express 3.0 x4 interface.


On the PCB, you'll find the controller, eight flash chips, and two DRAM chips.

Chip Component Analysis

The Silicon Motion SM2262 is an eight-channel flash controller with support for NVMe 1.3, TLC, and DDR3/DDR4 memory.


The eight flash chips are Toshiba 96-layer 3D TLC NAND; they have been rebranded by Kingston. Each chip has a capacity of 128 GB.


Two Kingston DDR3-1866 chips provide a total of 1 GB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables.