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SSD Kingston A2000 1TB and A2000R 500GB: similar on the outside, but different on the inside

Hello, Habr! We have repeatedly raised the topic here that with the advent of NVMe storage devices on the market, there was a small revolution in terms of reading and writing speeds of files: they doubled or even tripled in comparison with SATA SSDs. As usual, at first such productive NVMe solutions were expensive and ordinary users who did not have the financial capabilities of large companies simply could not afford such a pleasure. But now the situation has changed. Over the past couple of years, drive manufacturers, including Kingston, have put on sale a decent amount of inexpensive SSDs in the M.2 form factor, allowing the mass consumer to join the so-called high-end components.



Kingston SA2000M8 / 1000G and R500G: hardware, specifications and cost


With the advent of the Kingston A2000 series of drives from 250 GB to 1 TB, Kingston has once again reminded its competitors that it does not plan to take the lead in the market for affordable and productive NVMe SSDs. One of the features of these devices is support for XTS-AES hardware encryption, Windows BitLocker, and compatibility with TCG Opal security solutions. Such drives are equipped with a hardware encryption mechanism that works at the controller level and encodes each file stored in flash memory cells. Another “trick” of such drives is the ability to erase data tightly using the Revert method. We talked about this in more detail in the article about the operation of TCG Opal 2.0 encrypted SSDs .

The Kingston A2000R series of drives is essentially the same, but without self-encryption support. That is, they do not provide any advanced data protection “out of the box”. In addition, SSDs from the A2000R series are offered in only two capacities - 250 and 500 GB. A terabyte solution is not provided. And if you consider that Kingston SA2000M8 / 500G (with encryption) at a cost (about 7000 rubles) is equal to the Kingston SA2000M8R / 500G model (without encryption) - it is more logical to opt for a cryptographically-secure solution.



Returning to the SA2000M8 Series Drive, it is worth noting that Kingston A2000 without the letter “R” in the title supports TRIM, SMART and the previously mentioned function of safe data erasure without the possibility of their subsequent recovery. And the “drive” is given a five-year warranty from the manufacturer, plus the bundled delivery package offers the Acronis True Image OEM utility designed to clone the OS and transfer it from the old drive to the new NVMe. In addition to it, we recommend downloading the Kingston SSD Manager program from the manufacturer’s official website, which allows you to manage security functions, update firmware, perform formatting and simply monitor the status of SSDs. Kingston SA2000M8 / 1000G



Terabyte Drive, which visited our test, combines a 4-channel Silicon Motion SM2263ENG controller (supports PCI Express Gen 3.0 and NVMe 1.3 specification) with Micron's 96-layer TLC memory and a single-sided DDR4 buffer made on a printed circuit board. By the way, due to the one-sided arrangement of microcircuits, the drive turned out to be thin and can be installed in ultrabooks without any problems. In addition, it is easier to cool.



Given the specifications provided by the manufacturer, the end user can expect to achieve data read and write speeds of up to 2200 MB / s and 2000 MB / s, respectively. Want to quickly download your favorite video games? No problem! Need to host multiple virtual machines on a drive and edit high-definition video? For all of these scenariosKingston SA2000M8 / 1000G can be a very tasty morsel of the “iron cake”. In addition, it is the best choice for those users who store sensitive data on their business laptop.



Pay attention to the fact that Kingston NVMe-drives, depending on the level of the device, are available on printed circuit boards in different colors: for entry-level devices - blue textolite, and for professional solutions - black. In our case, the color of the printed circuit board is blue, and this allows us to conclude that both Kingston A2000 1TB and Kingston A2000R 500GB are entry-level solutions.

Drive Specifications




As we noted above, Kingston SA2000M8 / 1000G is available in three capacities: 250, 500 and 1000 GB. If you need a drive with even more capacity, you should consider the Kingston KC2000 2 TB model . However, it should be understood that this is a different level and a different price. At the time of writing, the average retail price of Kingston A2000 1TB SSDs in the Russian market is about 12,200 rubles (or 12.2 rubles per gigabyte of space). As for the A2000 series of drives with the letter “R”, the cost of the 250 gigabyte and 500 gigabyte versions corresponds to the price tag of ordinary A2000 drives, and therefore the cost of a gigabyte of disk space is similar.

Synthetic and practical tests


The actual capacity of Kingston A2000 1TB after formatting is 931.51 GB. For the 500-gigabyte Kingston A2000R, it is 476.92 GB. The rest of the memory is used to control flash memory. We performed all tests on a gaming computer with 64-bit “Windows 10 Home” version 10.586. As for the test bench, on which we “drove” drives, its configuration is shown in the table below. CrystalDiskMark 5.2.1 Testbed

Configuration





So, Kingston indicates the performance of its terabyte drive at 2200 MB / s for reading and 2000 MB / s for writing. The CrystalDiskMark synthetic test is positive in this regard and shows a maximum result of 2282 MB / s for reading and 2049 MB / s for writing. During the test, we made several runs with a benchmark, emulating operations with a file weighing 1, 8 and 32 GB. True, in practice you are unlikely to often copy such capacious data onto the drive, but if this happens suddenly, we tentatively already understand what speed indicators you can definitely count on.







ATTO Disk Benchmark

Many manufacturers often use the ATTO Disk Benchmark utility to assign specifications for sequential read and write speeds to their drives. This benchmark is also interesting because it immediately gives us a visual understanding of how the drive under test works with data blocks of different sizes. To enable you to compare the results with competitive solutions, we left the default benchmark settings and made several runs of Kingston A2000 1TB. What did we get as a result? The maximum read and write speeds recorded by ATTO Disk Benchmark are 2020 MB / s and 1950 MB / s, respectively.





AS SSD Benchmark 1.9.5

And now we move on to another no less popular test - AS SSD Benchmark, with which we also make several runs with a simulated file weighing 1 GB. And here the results are similar to those shown by other utilities: on average, the data read speed is 2057 MB / s, and the write speed is at 1996 MB / s.





AIDA64 Disk Benchmark

The popular set of tests and utilities for monitoring the status of the PC and its components, AIDA64, also includes the popular AIDA64 Disk Benchmark utility, which offers a set of test scripts for measuring read speeds and access time to the drive. The results shown to her are close to those of ATTO Disk Benchmark and CrystalDiskMark: the average read speed is 1794 MB / s. Please note that we are talking about average speed, not maximum speed. At CrystalDiskMark, this parameter is at the level of 1700-1843 MB / s.



Final Fantasy XIV


Final Fantasy XIV StormBlood download speed in seconds (the lower the better)

The Final Fantasy XIV StormBlood gaming benchmark is excellent in that it independently compares the game’s loading time with the built-in stopwatch. According to its results, Kingston A2000 1TB provides the highest performance during the game: the load time of the network RPG installed on the NVMe-drive was 12.49 s, which automatically sends it to the first place among all competitors. In second place is Kingston A2000R 500GB with a result of 12.63 s. In general, it is easy to guess that here the two SSDs are identical in performance.



For comparison, we ran the same test on the Western Digital WD Purple 1TB HDD (42.98 s) and two other NVMe drives of the same capacity: Intel SSD 660p 1TB (19.95 s) and ADATA XPG SX600 Pro 1TB (22.70 s) ) Well ... the results of Kingston A2000 and A2000R against their background are really surprising. This is also a good example of how random read performance at shallow queue depth shows itself. Premium NVMe SSDs nervously smoke in the corner, while Kingston A2000 1TB shows the best result, unlike synthetic measurements of the used benchmarks.

Test results


The Kingston A2000 and A2000R series are impressive and it looks like the new drives are ready to shake the entry-level NVMe SSD market. In addition, if you buy a drive without the letter “R”, we still get support for 256-bit hardware self-encryption, which allows you to reliably protect your data from unauthorized persons. Not only is the “drive” safe, but it is also impressively fast.

What else is interesting? It is worth noting that with its relatively high performance, the drive's heating remains at an acceptable level, during prolonged loads on the drive, the controller temperature did not rise above 59 ° C in a closed computer case. As we said above, this was achieved through the unilateral placement of chips on a printed circuit board. From here you can make a simple conclusion: during installationKingston SA2000M8 / 1000G in a full-sized PC or laptop you do not need to bother with the organization of additional heat sink in the form of radiators or air cooling.



Choosing a Silicon Motion SM2263ENG control chip coupled with Micron's 96-layer TLC memory was Kingston's wise decision. As a result, Kingston SA2000M8 / 1000G NVMe drive shows read and write speeds that are significantly superior to SATA SSDs, not to mention HDDs. And subject to attractive prices, it is also an excellent choice in terms of price, quality and speed characteristics. Thrifty users who want to retool their PC by adding a fast data storage to it will find everything they need in the Kingston A2000 NVMe. Moreover, at the moment this is one of the best solutions on the market.

Kingston A2000 and A2000R SSDs are available in partner stores:
- DNS-shop.ru: A2000 and A2000R
- Regard.ru
- Xcom-shop.ru

For more information on Kingston Technology products ( A2000 and A2000R models ), please visit the official website company.

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