INTRODUCTION

   I still remember receiving and testing my very first 2.5" SATA II SSD back in late 2007 (unlike today back then the performance gap between solid state drives and hard disk drives was something we hadn't seen before) so 12 years later it's no surprise that the industry has finally moved away from that form factor, at least partially since the majority of PC's even today still use 2.5" SSD models (just SATA III ones). Lately quite a few manufacturers seem to focus a lot more in the design and manufacture of M.2 NVMe drives but luckily there are always some who are not yet willing to cease support and production of 2.5" SSD drives. One such manufacturer is no other than Kingston and today we'll be testing the 512GB variant of their brand new KC600 line of 2.5" SATA III SSDs.

   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.

   The brand new KC600 line of 2.5" SATA III SSDs by Kingston (currently available in 256GB/512GB/1TB/2TB capacities) is based on the quad-channel SM2259 NAND flash controller by Silicon Motion which is paired with Micron's latest 96-layer 3D TLC NAND flash and a single LPDDR3 RAM cache module by Kingston (512MB for the 512GB model which we have here with us). The SM2259 NAND flash controller packs several features such as Silicon Motion's NANDXtend (error-correcting with LDPC hard and soft decoding and RAID protection), direct-to-TLC and SLC caching (algorithms for optimal sustained performance), end-to-end data path protection (ensures data integrity and reliability), global wear levelling (algorithm which evens program/erase count and extends SSD lifespan), DevSleep (device sleep - power save), S.M.A.R.T, TRIM, NCQ, TCG Opal and hardware AES 256bit encryption. In terms of endurance/durability Kingston reports 150TBW for the 256GB model, 300TBW for the 512GB model, 600TBW for the 1TB model and 1200TBW for the 2TB model (all models feature an MTBF of 1 million hours and are covered by a 5-year limited warranty).