Kingston A2000 500GB M.2 NVMe Review

Our initial review of the ADATA XPG SX8200  was the first M.2 NVMe we had for the year 2020 and today, we bring you the Kingston A2000 review.

The Kingston A2000 uses a Silicon Motion SM2263ENG controller paired with Micron 96-layer TLC flash. The controller is a four-channel layout with a 1GB DDR3L-1866 DRAM chip.

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Kingston kept everything simple only adding an Acronis True Image HD serial key and did not include any other accessories in the package. The True Image allows the ease of access to migrate existing data from old drives to your new ones. While Kingston’s SSD Manager toolbox comes free from their website. This, in turn, allows the management of security features, adjustment of overprovisioning, update firmware, secure erase, and monitoring of the drive.

The Kingston A2000 is an M.2 2280, single-sided form factor SSD which makes upgrading to any m.2-compatible system an easy task without any issues. Unlike most M.2 drives, Kingston utilizes a blue PCB.

AS SSD Benchmark

AS SSD benchmark gives a variety of results. There are now three tests that are found within the tool.

ATTO Benchmark

ATTO being one of the longest drive benchmarks used until today is still relevant in the SSD market. ATTO gives an idea of transfer across a specific volume length. This test was done with default runs.

This benchmark shows the Kingston A2000 M.2 NVMe speeds reaching up to 2.13 GB/s read and 1.92 GB/s write at Qeue Depth of 4. This is close to the rated read/write speeds of 2,200/2000 MB/s.

CrystalDiskMark 7

With our Crystal DiskMark, this replicates best-case, straight-line transfers of large files. This benchmark supports Native Command Queueing (NCQ) with a queue depth of 32 and represents the highest score of five runs.

The Kingston A2000 M.2 NVMe drive maxed out at 2277.40MB/s read and 2058.09MB/s write in the standard sequential write test that was done at Q8T1. Random 4K Q1T1 performance is at 60.74 MB/s read and 155.81 MB/s write.

Anvil’s Storage Utilities

Anvil Storage Utilities is one of the most used storage benchmarking tool. Testing from read and writes speeds to IOPS with various tweaks allowing multiple capabilities.

PC MARK 8

With the PCMark 8’s Storage test, this synthetic benchmark replicates everyday disk access like photo editing and web browsing. The variations on this test regarding PCIe drives are quite small.

Conclusion

NVMe Storages have been considering going down in price versus a SATA solution. Kingston Technology proves that the A2000 M.2 NVMe is a bang-for-the-buck NVMe with the performance it has shown.

The Kingston A2000 may not be the fastest NVMe in the market but has definitely proven it’s worth based on their our tests. Enthusiasts may still want better-performing storage but for those who are budget-conscious users who want to beef up their storage will be well served by the Kingston A2000.

Priced at ₱4,498.00 at Lazada, this is definitely one of the best valued NVMe SSDs on the market today, which is probably what Kingston aimed for. To top it all up, the 5-year warranty and competitive wear ratings keeps your mind at ease