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Sitting under the company's business and consumer banners, Kingston's KC2000 drive is the second one we've seen that uses 96-layer 3D NAND but the first to be readily available, as the first 96-layer drive, Toshiba's XG6 is an OEM part.
Where the Toshiba drive used an in-house controller to look after the Toshiba 96-layer BiCS4 3D TLC NAND, Kingston have chosen Silicon Motion's latest 8-channel controller, the SM2262EN for the KC2000.
When it comes to performance, Kingston quote Sequential read/write figures of 3,200MB/s and 2,200MB/s respectively for the 1TB drive which we could confirm with the ATTO benchmark. Under test the review drive produced a read figure of 3,130MB/s and 2,276MB/s for writes.
The 1TB KC2000 is rated at up to 350,000 IOPS for random reads and up to 275,000 IOPS for random writes. Under testing we got a peak random read performance of 308,960 IOPS (QD32) while the peak random write figure we got was 321,974 IOPS (QD16), both figures obtained testing the drive using four threads.
One feature of the KC2000 that will interest business users is the encryption support. A self-encrypting drive, the KC2000 uses 256-bit AES hardware-based encryption to provide support for end-to-end data protection. It has Microsoft eDrive support built in and also supports the use of independent TCG Opal 2.0 security management software from venders including McAfee, WinMagic and Symantec.
Kingston's SSD management utility, SSD Manager may not be as feature rich as some of its competitors such as Samsung and WD for example, but even so it automatically detects any firmware updates as well as displaying drive status, temperatures and SMART information and lets you keep an eye on TCG Opal and IEEE-1667 encryption settings.
We found the 1TB Kingston KC2000 on alza.co.uk for £160.90 (inc VAT) HERE
Pros
- Overall performance.
- Endurance.
- Encryption support.
Cons
- 4K QD2 reads a little disappointing in our tests.
Kitguru says: Kingston's KC2000 makes good use of the latest 96-layer 3D NAND technology, combining it with the latest controller from Silicon Image to produce not only the fastest M.2 NVMe Kingston drive we've tested to date but a drive with security at its heart.
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