Recently, quite a few manufacturers are focusing more on the design and production of M.2 NVMe drives, while many PC users still continue to use 2,5β SSDs. It's nice that Kingston does not forget about this, continuing to release 2,5-inch solutions. Today in our review - 512 GB , which supports connection via the SATA III bus (there are also versions with a capacity of 256 GB and 1 TB).
According to retailer statistics, this is the most popular container among buyers. Wellβ¦ that makes perfect sense. Like it or not, SSD drives are still more expensive than traditional HDDs, so a 1TB solid-state solution easily jumps over the psychological barrier of 10 rubles. At the same time, 000 GB is nothing if the user plays games and works with βheavyweightβ programs (for example, Adobe's graphic design software package).
The Kingston KC600 continues the legacy of the Kingston UV500 drives. True, in comparison with the UV-series, Kingston KC drives are noticeably cheaper. Moreover, the higher the capacity, the greater the difference in cost. In order not to be unfounded, let's take as an example price tags from Yandex.Market, where Kingston UV500 480GB (SATA III) is offered on average for 7000 rubles, and the cost of Kingston KC600 512GB (SATA III) starts from 6300 rubles.
Kingston KC600 Specifications
comes in a blister pack, which immediately informs us that the drive has a 5-year warranty. Let's open the package, and there will be no limit to joy - the drive case (only 7 mm thick) is made not of some kind of plastic, but of aluminum, which acts not only as a protection for the component base, but also as a heat dissipator.
Inside the case there is a compact printed circuit board: on one of its sides there are two Micron 96D TLC NAND 3-layer flash memory modules (128 GB each) and a Kingston 512 MB LPDDR4 RAM buffer memory module (1 MB DRAM per 1 GB drive memory) , on the second - two more flash memory modules (also 128 GB each) and a 4-channel Silicon Motion SM2259 controller.
As a rule, either a small part of the SSD is allocated for the cache (from 2 to 16 GB of static SLC cache), or some of the cells are dynamically switched to SLC mode (in this case, up to 10% of the capacity can be allocated for the cache), or two of these method (the static cache is complemented by the dynamic one). One of the main features of the drive is that its entire capacity can work as a fast SLC cache: that is, the type of memory changes dynamically (TLC in SLC), depending on the filling of the βdiskβ. This allows you to level the work of the slower TLC memory throughout the recording of the entire disk capacity and eliminates sharp drops in speed, as in static SLC modes.
If we return to the mention of the 5-year warranty, it is worth talking about the drive's MTBF. How much data can, in principle, be written to the drive until it goes into oblivion? According to the Kingston KC600 specifications, the TBW (Total Bytes Written) for a 512 GB drive is 150 TB. According to statistics, in a typical home PC, from 10 to 30 TB of data is overwritten on SSD per year with active use. So, you can be sure that the Kingston KC600 will operate without problems for more than five years and exceed the warranty period before it has a valid reason to become unreliable storage. In addition, the manufacturer guarantees 1 million hours of MTBF over the operating time.
In addition to high data transfer rates (>500 MB/s), the Kingston KC600 drive supports SMART attributes, TRIM, NCQ, supports TCG Opal 2.0 specifications, AES 256-bit hardware encryption, and eDrive. We also recommend downloading the Kingston SSD Manager program from the manufacturer's official website, which allows you to manage security functions, update firmware, format, and simply monitor the status of the SSD.
The ability to hardware-encrypt the entire drive has been a feature of high-end SSDs for some time, but Kingston offers it here, equipping its KC600 with a full feature set that rivals what Samsung offers in its 860 series. In terms of functionality, the KC600 will perform just fine practically on any desktop and mobile computer, but what will it show us in terms of performance?
Kingston KC600 512GB: performance tests
There are only three significant factors in evaluating a SATA SSD: price, performance, and durability. Price aside, at the moment the performance of any SATA drive is limited primarily by the SATA interface, so the bandwidth ceiling is 6 Gb/s (768 MB/s). And these are just theoretical figures. In practice, no SSD achieves this speed when reading and writing data.
The actual capacity of the Kingston KC600 512GB after formatting is 488,3GB. The rest of the memory is used to manage flash memory. We ran all tests on a gaming PC running 64-bit Windows 10 version 18.363. As for the test stand, on which we βdrivenβ the drive, its configuration is shown in the table below.
Today, testers have access to many different programs with synthetic load emulation that measure the performance of SSD solutions. However, none of them allows you to measure the speed of work as accurately as possible. Therefore, we use a wide range of software to conduct tests, and then rely on the average result.
CrystalDisk Mark 5.2.1
In the CrystalDiskMark test, speeds were 564 MB/s read and 516 MB/s write, which is an excellent achievement for a SATA III drive. To some, these results may seem familiar, and this is not surprising: identical results can be observed in the Samsung 860 EVO drive, despite the fact that it has a different memory and controller.
ACT Disk Benchmark
The results shown by ATTO Disk Benchmark are always interesting, as this program shows the relationship between the size of transferred data blocks and read / write speeds. Looking at the graphs, we see that the potential of the Kingston KC600 is revealed when manipulating the block size from 256 KB. Bottom line: the maximum speed values ββββare 494 MB / s when writing and 538 MB / s when reading data.
AS SSD Benchmark 1.9.5
The AS SSD Benchmark synthetic benchmark suite is another speed benchmarking tool that emulates predominantly incompressible data across a range of workloads. The results turned out to be a little more modest, but the gap from the CrystalDiskMark indicators is not very large: 527 MB / s when reading and 485 MB / s when writing data.
HD Tune Pro 4.60
HD Tune Pro test scenarios are considered reference. The program measures three parameters at once: maximum, average and minimum speed when reading and writing. But when compared to AS SSD Benchmark and CrystalDiskMark, they are always more skeptical. In this case, the utility shows a maximum of 400 MB / s when writing and 446 MB / s when reading.
During the test, HD Tune Pro emulated the process of writing 8 GB files to the drive (until the "disk" was full), and then emulated reading information from 40 GB files. In the first case, the data writing speed varied on average from 325 MB/s to 275 MB/s. In the second test, the data read speed ranged from 446 MB / s to 334 MB / s. At the same time, there are no strong subsidences in speed on the graphs.
AnvilPro 1.1.0
The AnvilPro utility is an old but still reliable tool for measuring the performance of data drives, which captures read / write speeds, the number of input / output operations (IOPS) and load endurance factor. In the case of the Kingston KC600 512GB, the measurement results were as follows: 512 MB / s - when reading, 465 MB / s - when writing. The average number of I / O operations per second is 85 IOPS for reading and 731 IOPS for writing.
Kingston KC600 512GB: results
It would seem that the era of SATA SSD is heading towards decline, but in fact it is not. Not every user is ready to spend money on upgrading an old system for the sole purpose of installing an M.2 class drive. On some motherboards, by the way, the M.2 connector is not implemented in the best way and uses only 1-2 PCI-e lanes instead of 4: you wonβt be able to achieve maximum performance from an NVMe drive in this situation.
For those users who still use 2,5-inch SATA solutions in their stationary PCs and laptops, Kingston KC600 512GB will be the best purchase: in terms of performance, it easily beats all competitors. First, it has a full set of security features that should be attractive to a business audience (we are talking about XTS-AES 256-bit hardware data encryption, as well as support for TCG Opal 2.0 and eDrive). Second, it offers a good margin of safety in the form of a five-year warranty. Thirdly, Kingston KC600 provides very good read and write speeds. Not every PCIe-SSD will show such stable speed and performance.
And by the way, until April 20, you can literally get a Kingston KC600 512GB SSD for free. To do this, you need to take part . Hint: you can find the answers to them on the official , so look carefully and easily cope with the task. Participate in the competition and on April 23 we will find out who will be the winner!
Well, if you do not want to participate, or wait for the results of the competition, then KC600 SSD drives are already available for sale from partners:
For more information about Kingston Technology products, please visit company.
Source: habr.com