Kingston KC2000 + Silverstone MS11

I know what you are thinking here, and I agree that an M.2 SSD by itself is a strange addition to this article. It gets stranger since we have not done a dedicated review of the Kingston KC2000 at this point either, and all I can say is that a firmware issue is keeping that on the back burner. Kingston did ask if we could then talk about the security features of the drive as it pertains to this article, and then Silverstone came into the picture with their brand new MS11 NVMe M.2 SSD to external USB enclosure at the time of writing. Indeed, I was the very first recipient of a retail MS11 from Silverstone, so the set fit in nicely with this haphazard combination unified under a common theme.


Given the full review of the Kingston KC2000 is not going to be coming out immediately, I decided to do an overview of the SSD as it would be delivered to a retail customer. The KC2000 comes packaged similar to most M.2 drives, with a relatively small plastic cover meant to hold its place in a brick-and-mortar store. The company and product name are on the front, along with a clear plastic clamshell that shows off the drive better, and more features and specs adorn the printed sides for those wanting to make a decision on which drive to pick in person. The clamshell can easily be pulled out and is a two-piece plastic construction with a clear cover and a snug-fitting base.


The drive itself is an NVMe SSD in the M.2 2280 form factor (M-key) and employs a PCIe Gen 3.0x4 interface for data and power alike. Kingston offers the drive in 250 GB, 500 GB, 1 TB, and 2 TB, with all using Toshiba's new BICS4 96-layer NAND flash modules I had the pleasure of seeing at CES this year. These are paired to a Silicon Motion SMI 2262EN controller, and all components are soldered very well on to the multi-layer PCB, allowing for the typical M.2 form factor svelteness. There are components on both sides of the PCB, so keep that in mind when it comes to cooling and installation on a motherboard or, as here, inside an enclosure.


Speaking of which, here's what the packaging for Silverstone's MS11 NVMe M.2 SSD to USB 3.1 Gen 2 adapter looks like. As with Kingston, Silverstone wants to make sure customers chancing upon this inside a retail store have all the information they need to make an informed decision. This comes in the form of colored renders of the product and accessories, as well as a quick speed-test result on the back to assure the customer that they won't have to give up a lot of performance when going from the internal to external media type. More plastic clamshells greet us inside, with an installation guide, precision Phillips head screwdriver, male USB Type-C to female Type-A adapter, 30-cm long braided male USB Type-C to male Type-A cable, and three thermal pads provided as accessories. The provided cable is especially important since it has to provide the necessary bandwidth to ensure the promised higher performance relative to most other such enclosure and cable combinations.


The enclosure itself, as with the USB connectors on the adapter and cable, is made out of an aluminium alloy that has been given a metallic charcoal finish. The Silverstone logo is present on the front, alongside an LED status indicator by the USB Type-C port on the side. Two small screws need to be removed with the provided screwdriver to access the PCB inside, which can accommodate NVMe M.2 (M-key) SSDs of the 2242, 2260, and 2280 form factors. There is already a screw with a nut pre-installed in the final slot for the more common 2280 form factor drives, which needs to be loosened prior to installing the drive. The PCB itself holds the aforementioned blue status LED and a JMicron JMS583 capable of driving up to a 10 Gbps connection over USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C. The enclosure is limited to PCIe Gen 3.0x2 as far as drive-interface support goes, so this is partly where backwards compatibility of your drive comes in, and the natural performance deficit relative to a native Gen3.0x4 pipeline.


Installing the Kingston KC2000 is extremely easy as long as you follow the clear instructions for the different thermal pads on either side of the drive. The pads themselves have a rated thermal conductivity of 1.5 W/m.K, which won't break any records anywhere, but will also do plenty enough combined with the metal enclosure and passive airflow outside to minimize thermal throttling better than the average internal installation underneath a plastic "heatsink" trap on most motherboards. The enclosure measures in at 107 mm x 11 mm x 32.5 mm and weighs ~55 grams by itself before the drive is installed. Depending on port availability on your desktop, laptop or similar device, you may find the provided cable handy by itself, or have to use the adapter to access a Type-C port.


Kingston has an SSD manager for their client SSD drives, which allows the end user to perform simple tasks, including firmware updates, monitoring the drive's health, and managing any supported security options that are drive-specific. For the KC2000, when installed as an internal drive, you would be able to do a secure erase, as well as access TCG Opal 2.0 security options to set up a password for encryption. In addition, the KC2000 is a self-encrypting drive (XTS-AES 256-bit) with support for Microsoft's eDrive functionality for use with Bitlocker, or similar compatible programs based on the IEEE 1667 (and also TCG Opal 2.0) specifications. In an ideal world, these functions would be retained with the drive inside an external enclosure. However, and there are variables involved, including the different controllers and potential firmware issues, the program did not recognize the drive as a Kingston SSD when installed in the Silverstone MS11 enclosure. Neither Silverstone nor Kingston could guarantee the encryption features would work, with the latter noting that external enclosures are not supported by them and the former not having any first-hand experience in this specific matter. So it may be a case of your mileage varying from mine, but this specific combination with the latest KC2000 firmware at the time of writing (S2681101) is not a great option for portable storage with encryption support.


For those curious about how the combo fared in terms of performance, I decided it was only apt to run the same test as with the other drives. The drive itself is capable of much more, and look out for that in our eventual comprehensive review of the drive, but when paired with a USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-A port, it was immediately bottlenecked beyond even the capabilities of the Silverstone MS11 enclosure. Noting that the vast majority of end users traveling for work with sensitive digital material do not have a USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C port to spare, this is the typical result. However, it is still significantly better than the other options tested here, with 4K random reads and writes especially impressive.

The Kingston KC2000 series comes in 0.25/0.5/1/2/ TB capacity options, with the lineup costing between $62.40 and $410.80 from the Kingston store and this specific 1 TB model coming in at $201.50 as of the date of this article. The Silverstone MS11 external enclosure for NVMe M.2 SSDs costs $59.99 from retailers, including Newegg, which is an additional cost for those interested in the external storage route.