Kingston KC2500 M.2 NVMe SSD Review : TechGoggles

Kingston’s KC2500 is the company’s 2020 refresh of the KC series and continues to leverage the same hardware as its predecessor. However, Kingston’s KC2500 comes with mature 96L TLC that can operate at the higher speed needed to be competitive, without sacrificing long-term reliability. With this boost, Kingston’s KC2500 is capable of delivering much faster sequential performance across the capacity range.

Specifications

Form Factor	M.2 2280
Interface	NVMe™ PCIe Gen 3.0 x 4 Lanes
Capacities	250GB, 500GB, 1TB, 2TB
Controller	SMI 2262EN
NAND	96-layer 3D TLC
Encrypted	XTS-AES 256 bit
Sequential Read/Write¹	250GB – up to 3,500/1,200MB/s 500GB – up to 3,500/2,500MB/s 1TB – up to 3,500/2,900MB/s 2TB – up to 3,500/2,900MB/s
Random 4K Read/Write¹	250GB – up to 375,000/300,000 IOPS 500GB – up to 375,000/300,000 IOPS 1TB – up to 375,000/300,000 IOPS 2TB – up to 375,000/300,000 IOPS
Total Bytes Written (TBW)³	250GB – 150TBW 500GB – 300TBW 1TB – 600TBW 2TB – 1.2PBW
Power Consumption	.003W Idle / .2W Avg / 2.1W (MAX) Read / 7W (MAX) Write
Storage Temperature	-40°C~85°C
Operating Temperature	0°C~70°C
Dimensions	80mm x 22mm x 3.5mm
Weight	250GB – 8g 500GB – 10g 1TB – 10g 2TB – 11g
Vibration Operating	2.17G Peak (7-800Hz)
Vibration Non-operating	20G Peak (20-1000Hz)
MTBF	2,000,000
Warranty/Support⁴	Limited 5-year warranty with free technical support

Kingston’s KC2500 M.2 NVMe SSDs are available in capacities of 250GB up to 2TB and feature an NVMe PCIe Gen 3 interface. Kingston’s KC2500 comes in an M.2 2280 double-sided form factor with a black PCB, that looks really good. However, you won’t be seeing this in most motherboards but it’s still a nice touch. There are eight NAND packages in total that are assembled as four dies per package. These newer yields have proven more reliable than early ones because of which the new KC2500 sees a nice uplift in speed which we’ll get to in a little bit. It also comes with a limited 5-year warranty but we doubt you’ll ever need that given the longevity of these drives. It also comes with the Kingston SSD Manager to keep an eye on your drive and it’s status. And should you ever need technical support, that too is available for free.

If you have sensitive data, Kingston’s KC2500 is a self-encrypting drive (SED) that features XTS-AES 256-bit hardware-based acceleration that is TCG Opal 2.0 compliant and meets IEEE-1667 specs. The XTS bit part means that it uses the XTS block cipher mode which provides stronger data protection over other modes as it uses two AES keys.

Performance

We installed a bunch of games on this SSD to check loading times and general gaming performance. We also ran a few synthetic tests. Safe to say, the KC2500 handled it all really well. We ran games like Cyberpunk, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Witcher 3, Overwatch, Watch Dogs Legion and Seo of Thieves on this drive to test its general gaming usage and it’s loading times were almost non-existent. In Overwatch, I ended up being the first person to join matches because of how fast this SSD was. Load times in Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk were incredibly fast too. Even GTA V which takes forever to load performed quite well on this.

CrystalDiskMark 6 Sequential Read	3518.4MBps	(Higher is Better)
CrystalDiskMark 6 Sequential Write	2569.4MBps	(Higher is Better)
Final Fantasy XVII Benchmark Load Times	9.43s	(Lower is Better)
DiskBench 50GB CopyTransfer Rate	634MBps	(Higher is Better)
PCMark 10 Storage Test	2584 points	(Higher is Better)

Conclusion

From the numbers, it’s pretty clear that this is a speedy drive. Booting windows, editing off of it, copying files and playing games was a breeze with this. Everything we tried was incredibly fast and responsive. Heck, installing Windows on this was so fast that I was taken aback. If you’re looking for a drive to bolster your system with, the Kingston KC2500 is perfect. It’s fast, it’s reliable, secure and it comes with a good warranty as well to give you some peace of mind.