Kingston KC2500 M.2 NVMe Solid State Drive Review

There is so much NVMe storage out there it is really hard to choose which drive is the best for you. Today we will be taking a look at Kingston’s KC2500, which is the successor to their KC2000 that we took a look at earlier this year. It actually has the same hardware including the Silicon Motion SM2262EN controller and 96-layer 3D TLC NAND, but the NAND is more mature and the firmware is new. This allows for the drive to have sequential read and write speeds of 3500 MB/s and 2900 MB/s respectively. Is this a drive you should consider? Read on as we find out!

Special thanks to Kingston for providing us with the KC2500 M.2 NVMe Solid State Drive to review.

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/Write:
– 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/Write:
– 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):
– 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/Support: Limited 5-year warranty with free technical support

Packaging

The Kingston KC2500 comes in a pretty simple blister-pack that you would find at the store. On the front it lets us know we have the 1TB version of the drive and that it has a 5-year warranty.