Kingston A2000 NVMe SSD review: fast and cheap

That the prices of SSDs have been falling for some time is just as well known, but Kingston is adding to that. NVMe SSD prices for 10 cents per gigabyte thanks to Kingston’s new A2000, which also offers surprisingly good performance the vast majority of the time.

Kingston A2000 NVMe SSD
Kingston A2000 NVMe SSD

Design and functions

The A2000 is a 2280 (22 mm wide, 80 mm long) M.2, PCIe 3.0 x4, NVMe SSD, which is available in capacities of 250 GB, 500 GB and 1 TB. We must admit that we had to look twice when we saw those prices, because they are considerably lower than those of the Addlink S70, which itself set a price record a month or so ago. 1T B nowadays seems to be the sweet spot in price per gigabyte. At the time of this writing, the 2 TB / 4 TB SSDs with a larger capacity, SATA or NVMe, were still in the 20-cent-per-gigabyte category.

The A2000s use a Silicon Motion (SMI) 2263 controller and 96 layers of TLC NAND. The NAND is all on one side of the board, making it thin enough for almost any laptop. Caching is done by treating the TLC as SLC, or one-bit NAND. Writing a single bit is much faster than writing three bits.

Kingston offers a nice five-year warranty on the A2000, although the TBW (TeraBytes that can be written) ratings are not particularly large at this time: 150 TB per 250 GB of capacity. But that’s probably more than the average user will write in 10 years. TBW ratings are generally used to give a company a way out in case someone decides to use a consumer drive such as the A2000 in a high-transaction server.

Performance

The A2000 performs well, if not on par with the fastest drives on the market. We have tested the 500 GB version, and Kingston values ​​the 1 TB for the same 2.1 GBps writing performance. However, because there are fewer chips to write over, the 250 GB version is capable of writing at a maximum of 1,100MBps.

The 500 GB version does not slow down during medium length writing, as shown by our 48 GB single file writing test. However, it was delayed to slightly less than 500MBps during the 450 GB writing test. During the first run, which took place after writing about 50 GB of data, but in two subsequent runs, the writing speeds did not fall to 500 MBps to the approximately 150 GB mark.

With the smart caching that manufacturers use nowadays, it is likely that more TLC was treated as SLC in the last runs. Keep in mind that SLC cache is allocated in proportion to the total capacity of the drive, so you can assume that the 500 GB and 250 GB versions will drop considerably faster to 500 MBps.

In the “worst” case you will have to do it with SATA speeds in those very rare cases that you are pumping such huge amounts of data. You will at most encounter this delay if you clone a drive or move an uncompressed video, so that is not something we pay for this drive on.

Looking at these benchmark results you would think that the performance of this drive is disappointing, but in practice you hardly notice any difference.

Although the A2000 is slower than much of the competition, it is not slow enough to worry about. We saw no difference in real-world applications such as Windows 10 running on this drive instead of the Samsung 970 Pro that is often used here. After all, we are talking about NVME and the A2000 is equipped with the usual super fast 0.02 millisecond search times.

Conclusion

Kingston recommends its slightly more expensive KC2000 for data-intensive applications, and it’s a bit faster, especially during long writing times. But to be honest, the A2000 is enough for most users, and it is super affordable The best price / performance drive at the moment. That can of course change (quickly), but this is really a very good M.2 NVMe SSD from Kingston for a very, very nice price.

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