Kingston KC2500 NVMe SSD 1TB Review

Kingston’s KC2500 drive is packaged in a blister pack with the drive sitting in a plastic tray. Sitting under the drive is an Acronis True Image HD activation key, the software is available as a download from the Kingston website.

On the top right of the cardboard backing is the drives capacity along with a panel explaining how much faster than a standard 7,200 rpm mechanical drive the KC2500 is. To the right of this is a logo displaying the fact that Kingston backs the drive with a 5-year warranty. The rear of that packaging houses some multi-lingual marketing notes.

The 1TB KC2500 is a dual-sided design. Sitting under the product label that practically covers the PCB you will find the Silicon Motion SM2262EN controller and four 128GB packages of 96-layer 3D TLC NAND. The other side of the PCB is home to four more NAND packages and two 512MB DDR3L cache ICs.

Silicon Motion’s SM2262EN is an 8-channel controller with an 800 MT/s interface speed supporting NVMe 1.3 specifications. It supports ONFI 4.0/3.0 and Toggle 3.0/2.0 NAND and NV-DDR3 as well as DDR3, DDR3L, LPDDR3 and DDR4 DRAM.

Kingston’s SSD management utility is called SSD Manager, (version  v1.1.2.6. at the time of testing the drive) It automatically detects any firmware updates as well as displaying drive status, temperatures and SMART information. It also has a page for TCG Opal and IEEE-1667 encryption settings.

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