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Kingston KC600 512GB: Solid Rocket



Recently, quite a lot of manufacturers are paying more attention to the design and production of M.2 NVMe drives, while many PC users still continue to use 2.5 ”SSDs. It's nice that Kingston does not forget about this, continuing to release 2.5-inch solutions. Today we have a review - 512-gigabyte Kingston KC600 , which supports connection via SATA III bus (also on sale there are versions with a capacity of 256 GB and 1 TB).

According to statistics from retailers, this is the most running capacity among buyers. Well ... that’s quite logical. Whatever one may say, SSDs are still more expensive than traditional HDDs, so a solid-state solution with a capacity of 1 TB easily jumps over the psychological barrier of 10,000 rubles. At the same time, 256 GB is about nothing if the user plays games and works with “heavy” programs (for example, the software package for graphic design from Adobe).

Kingston KC600 is the continuation of the traditions inherent in 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, we give an example of price tags from Yandex.Market, where Kingston UV500 480GB (SATA III) is offered for an average of 7,000 rubles, and the cost of Kingston KC600 512GB (SATA III) starts at 6,300 rubles.

Kingston KC600: specifications


Kingston KC600 comes in a blister pack that immediately informs us that the drive has a 5-year warranty. We will open the packaging and there will be no limit - the drive case (only 7 mm thick) is made not of some plastic there, but of aluminum, which acts not only as a protection of the component base, but also as a heat dissipator.



A compact circuit board is located inside the case: on one of its sides there are two 96-layer Micron 3D TLC NAND 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 to the cache (from 2 to 16 GB of static SLC cache), or part of the cells is dynamically switched to SLC mode (in this case, up to 10% of the capacity can be allocated to the cache), or two of them work at once method (static cache is complemented by dynamic). 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 size of the “disk”. This allows you to level the work of a slower TLC-memory during the recording of the entire disk capacity and eliminates sharp subsidence in speed, as in static SLC modes.



If we return to the mention of the 5-year warranty, it’s 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 technical specifications of Kingston KC600, TBW (total number of recorded bytes) for a drive with a capacity of 512 GB will be 150 TB. According to statistics, in a typical home PC for a year, from 10 to 30 TB of data is overwritten on an SSD with active use. So, you can be sure that the Kingston KC600 will work for more than five years without problems and exceed the warranty period before it has a good reason to become an unreliable storage. In addition, the manufacturer guarantees 1 million hours of MTBF.



In addition to high data transfer rates (> 500 MB / s), Kingston KC600 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 features, update firmware, perform formatting and simply monitor the status of SSDs.

The ability to encrypt the entire drive for some time has been a feature of high-performance SSDs, but Kingston offers it here, equipping its KC600 with a full set of functions that compete with what Samsung offers in its 860 series. In terms of functionality, the KC600 will work practically well 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. If you leave the price aside, at the moment the performance of any SATA-drive is limited mainly by the SATA-interface, so the bandwidth ceiling is 6 Gb / s (768 MB / s). And these are just theoretical indicators. In practice, not a single solid-state drive reaches such speed when reading and writing data.



The actual capacity of Kingston KC600 512GB after formatting is 488.3 GB. The rest of the memory is used to control flash memory. All tests we performed on a gaming computer with 64-bit Windows 10 version 18.363. As for the test bench on which we “drove” the drive, its configuration is shown in the table below.



Today, testers have many different programs with synthetic emulation of loads that measure the performance of SSD solutions. However, none of them can measure the speed of work as accurately as possible. Therefore, for testing, we use a wide range of software, and then rely on the average result.

CrystalDiskMark 5.2.1


In the CrystalDiskMark test, the speed indicators were 564 MB / s for reading and 516 MB / s for writing, which is an excellent achievement for the SATA III drive. To some, these results may seem familiar, and this is not surprising: identical indicators can be observed with the Samsung 860 EVO drive, despite the fact that it has a different memory and controller.







ATTO Disk Benchmark


The results that ATTO Disk Benchmark shows are always interesting, since this program shows the relationship between the size of the blocks of transmitted data and the read / write speeds. Looking at the graphs, we see that the potential of Kingston KC600 is revealed during manipulations with block sizes from 256 KB. Bottom line: the maximum speed values ​​are 494 MB / s for writing and 538 MB / s for data reading operations.





AS SSD Benchmark 1.9.5


The AS SSD Benchmark synthetic test suite is another benchmark tool that simulates working with mostly incompressible data over a range of workloads. The results were a little more modest, but the gap between CrystalDiskMark is not very large: 527 MB / s for reading and 485 MB / s for writing data.







HD Tune Pro 4.60


Test scenarios HD Tune Pro are considered reference. The program measures three parameters at once: maximum, average and minimum speed when reading and writing. But, if you compare its results with AS SSD Benchmark and CrystalDiskMark, they are always more skeptical. In this case, the utility shows the maximum 400 MB / s for writing and 446 MB / s for reading.

During the test, HD Tune Pro emulated the process of writing to a file drive of size 8 GB (until the disk is completely full), and then emulated reading information from 40-gigabyte files. In the first case, the data recording speed varied on average from 325 MB / s to 275 MB / s. In the second test, the data reading speed ranged from 446 MB / s to 334 MB / s. At the same time, there are no strong subsidence in speed on the graphs.





AnvilPro 1.1.0


AnvilPro is an old-fashioned, but still reliable tool for measuring the performance of data storage devices that records read / write speeds, the number of input-output operations (IOPS) and the endurance coefficient under load. In the case of 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 85,731 IOPS for reading and 87,709 IOPS for writing.







Kingston KC600 512GB: results


It would seem that the era of SATA SSD is heading towards sunset, but in reality it is not. Not every user is willing to spend money on upgrading an old system with only one purpose - to install 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 lines instead of 4: to achieve maximum performance from an NVMe drive in this situation will not work.

For those users who are still using 2.5-inch SATA solutions in their desktops and laptops, Kingston KC600 512GB will be the best purchase: it easily takes on all competitors in terms of performance. Firstly, it has a full set of security features that should be attractive to a business audience (we are talking about hardware-based 256-bit encryption of XTS-AES data, as well as support for TCG Opal 2.0 and eDrive). Secondly, it offers a good margin of “strength” 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, the Kingston KC600 512GB SSD can be literally free. To do this, take partin our competition and answer 5 simple questions . Hint: you will find the answers to them on the official Kingston website , so look more carefully and easily cope with the task. Take part in the competition and on April 23 we will find out who will be the winner!

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UPDATE

Dear friends! We summed up the results of the competition in which we played the 512 GB Kingston KC600 SSD. Total number of participants: 1851, of which 1543 people correctly answered all questions. You can find the correct answers here , and see how they summed up in this video .

The winner was Nikita from Moscow, congratulations! We will contact you at the contact you indicated in the competition. Thank you all for participating, see you soon!

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KC600 SSDs are now available from partners:


For more information on Kingston Technology products, visit the company's official website .

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