Upgrading with Kingston : Kingston KC600 512GB Review

M.2 SSD has become quite the staple nowadays for PC builds but  SATA SSDs are still quite relevant. Many known manufacturers like Kingston still produce then and today, we have an encrypted high-performance SSD that keeps your data protected – The Kingston KC600 512 SATA SSD.

The KC600 is available in four capacities: 256GB, 512GB, 1TB and 2TB utilizing a Silicon Motion Sm2259 controller and Micron 96-layer 3D TLC NAND giving us speeds of up to 550MB/s sequential reads and 520MB/s sequential writes.

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The Kingston KC600 comes in their usual plastic packaging like most of the recent Kingston SSDs in the market. As for what’s inside, you will only find the KC600 SSD. They opted to remove freebies like the Acronis True Image HD Hard Drive cloning app product key that comes with models like the A2000.

The SSD itself is in a 2.5″ form factor metal enclosure with about 7mm height which is the standard for most SATA SSDs.

SOFTWARE

The Kingston KC600 utilizes Kingston’s own SSD management software, the Kingston SSD Manager allowing users to perform firmware updates for the SSD, access security features and monitor health easily.

Performance Testing

AS SSD Benchmark

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

CrystalDiskMark

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.

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.

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

When we talk about performance, we have to really can’t say anything about the Kingston KC600 as it delivered the expected results without any hitches during the tests we’ve done. It may not be the fastest SSD in the market but it gets the job done at a very affordable price. This same SSD can also be utilized for various notebooks in the market.

It would most likely be new PC builders or notebook upgrades that would want to upgrade from the usual mechanical drives or lower capacity SSD to faster read and write speeds. The KC600 is also suitable for content creators who want to upgrade from mechanical drives. For a price of ₱3,995.00, it is already a decent upgrade for a 512GB SSD.