The Kingston KC2000 SSD Review: Bringing BiCS4 To Retail

Conclusion

Kingston is a well-known and high-volume SSD brand, but they have not had much of an impact on the high-end segment of the market. The Kingston KC2000 is much better try than several other enthusiast-oriented SSDs we've seen from them. On paper, the KC2000 is one of the more advanced SSDs currently on the market thanks to its inclusion of Toshiba's 96-layer 3D TLC NAND while the bulk of its competition is still using 64-layer NAND flash memory. The SSD controller used by the KC2000 is Silicon Motion's SM2262EN, which has a proven track record and still holds the record for some of our tests.

The combination of the Silicon Motion SM2262EN controller and Toshiba's 96-layer 3D TLC NAND flash memory works well to produce a decent high-end consumer SSD, but it doesn't break new ground. We've seen Toshiba get better power efficiency out of the same NAND using their own controller, and ADATA get better performance (and often better efficiency as well) from the SM2262EN controller by pairing it with Micron 64L TLC NAND. This novel controller+NAND combination doesn't have any compelling advantages, but it is competitive against the existing lineup and should suffice until Silicon Motion's next generation of controllers is ready. When Micron's 96L TLC starts showing up in competing drives, it may have a clear performance advantage over Toshiba's NAND.

The KC2000's biggest weaknesses show up on our ATSB tests of real-world IO patterns. Other drives based on the SM2262EN controller seem highly tuned for peak performance on lighter workloads, and suffer greatly on the harder tests. The Kingston KC2000 is missing that great peak performance, but it still suffers about as much on the harder tests. The KC2000 manages to generally stay ahead of entry-level NVMe drives on those harder tests, but it is outperformed by even Intel's QLC-based 660p in more realistic conditions where the drives aren't completely full and a faster SLC cache can be a big help.

Kingston seems to be pricing the KC2000 against flagship TLC drives from the top tier brands like Samsung and Western Digital, but Kingston isn't a top-tier brand. They are one of the largest second-tier brands, but they buy their components on the open market and didn't add any special sauce to the KC2000. They need to be competing against the likes of ADATA and can't really expect to charge much of a premium over even smaller brands.

There are simply too many alternatives to the KC2000 that are far cheaper. ADATA and HP have better drives using the same controller, and they're at least 25% cheaper per GB. There are Phison E12 drives approaching half the price of the KC2000, and the Kingston loses quite a few benchmarks against them.

96-layer 3D TLC NAND may be the future, but for now it's not doing Kingston any favors. When 64L NAND production starts to wind down and the NAND manufacturers try to get their margins back up, the KC2000 may end up looking somewhat competitive. But in the near future, the going rate for this grade of SSD will be staying much cheaper than what Kingston is asking for.