INTRODUCTION

   M.2 NVMe SSD models may not offer the same price/capacity ratio nor do they share the same compatibility with older systems as their 2.5" SATA brothers but due to high demand and popularity levels manufacturers have shifted their focus almost entirely on them. Sure some 2.5" SSD models have been released lately (manufacturers do have to cater to the needs of consumers with older systems after all) but nowhere close in number compared to M.2 NVMe models (and that's not a bad thing since competition has forced prices to go down quite a bit). Kingston has released several M.2 SSD models to date the top of which was their KC1000 M.2 NVMe drive launched early last year. 1+ year later its successor called the KC2000 was just announced officially and the 1TB variant also found its way to our lab.

   Kingston Technology Company, Inc. is the world’s largest independent manufacturer of memory products. Kingston designs, manufactures and distributes memory products for desktops, laptops, servers, printers, and Flash memory products for PDAs, mobile phones, digital cameras, and MP3 players. Through its global network of subsidiaries and affiliates, Kingston has manufacturing facilities in California, Taiwan, China and sales representatives in the United States, Europe, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, Australia, India, Taiwan, China, and Latin America.

   For their brand new KC2000 M.2 2280 SSD (PCIe Gen3 x4 NVMe 1.3 - currently available in 250/500/1000/2000GB capacities) Kingston paired the Silicon Motion SM2262EN 8-channel NAND flash controller with Toshiba's latest BiCS4 96-layer 3D TLC NAND flash modules and 1GB LPDDR3 SDRAM (this configuration offers performance numbers of up to 3200MB/s in reads and 2200MB/s in writes). The SM2262EN NAND flash controller packs several technologies including Silicon Motion’s proprietary NANDXtend error-correcting code (ECC), datapath protection, end to end data protection with SRAM ECC, S.M.A.R.T, TRIM, NCQ, thermal-throttling, active garbage collection, DevSleep (device sleep), LDPC (Low Density Parity Check), SLC write acceleration (algorithms for optimal sustained performance), AES-256bit hardware encryption and of course fully supports TCG Opal 2.0 and IEEE-1667 (fully compatible with Microsoft's eDrive and EU's GDPR). In terms of endurance Kingston reports an MTBF (mean time between failures) of up to 2 million hours and TBW (total bytes written) numbers of up to 150TB for the 250GB model, 300TB for the 500GB model, 600TB for the 1TB model and 1200TB for the 2TB model (the entire line is covered by a 5-year limited warranty).