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Review: Kingston KC600 1TB SSD

Kingston offers some of the best solid-state drives at affordable prices in the market. We take a look at the new Kingston KC600 1TB SSD on how it performs for the average user and also some of its security features that appeal to business users.

Features

While NVMe SSDs are quite expensive for the normal user, SATA SSDs are comparatively cheaper and offer great performance as compared to a traditional HDD. The Kingston KC600 SSD series comes in both the 2.5′ SATA model and the mSATA configuration, and we got the 1TB 2.5′ copy for review. As you can see, the KC600 SSD has an all-black body with the Kingston logo on the front side.

Kingston has featured the drive with a full-fledged security suite that helps to secure your data. And this is a selling factor for business users or IT admins due to the sensitivity of confidential data. Kingston mentions that the KC600 is a hardware-based self-encrypting drive and suite consists of the AES 256-bit hardware encryption, TCG Opal, and the eDrive. The AES 256-bit encryption is commonly found in almost all drives on the market.

TCG Opal, or Trusted Computing Group Opal, develops open standards for Trusted Computing Platforms. TCG Opal is one of the encryption tools that encrypts/decrypts data within the drive, without the need for a host to intervene. This enables faster encryption or decryption without affecting system performance and lowering the risk of data leakage. The eDrive is basically a storage specification developed by Microsoft to use on the BitLocker. The standard is solely based on TCG Opal and IEEE 1667 security specifications.

The drive hardly weighs 40g, so it’s a good drive for those who want to upgrade their laptops. The power consumption of the drive is hardly 0.06W at idle state, 0.2W during normal operations, and up to 3.2W consumption when writing data. So this helps to increase the battery life of your laptop.

Performance

The new Kingston KC600 SSD uses 3D TLC NAND chips and the controller is the SM2259. Kingston mentions that the KC600 features a read and write speed of 550MB/s and 520MB/s, respectively. It’s more or less the same as any other modern SATA SSD in the market. The maximum 4K read goes up to 90,000 IOPS and the write speed capability is rated up to 80,000 IOPS.

We ran CrystalDiskMark on our review copy and got the results shown below. The read speed shows about 552MB/s speed and the write speed at 479MB/s. Now, this depends from system to system and it could be a number of reasons why CrystalDiskMark couldn’t touch the 500MB mark for write speeds. That said, the speeds we got are generally the average results most modern SSD delivers.

We also did a folder transfer test where we copied the entire GTA 5 game folder from another SSD drive to the Kingston KC600. The drive we mentioned is none other than a 2TB Samsung 860 EVO SATA SSD.

The folder had a total size of over 60GB of data. The file transfer took about 3 minutes and 44 seconds to complete and the average transfer speed was about 470MB/s. I did notice that the write speeds went above 520MB/s at certain times while transferring some of the files. We also should note that the drive has a TBW rating of 600TB, which means users will be able to write large chunks of data without worrying about wearing out the memory chips.

Verdict

If you are looking to upgrade your old PC or your laptop and want a drive that offers security features at an affordable price, then the Kingston KC600 should be on your shopping list. The drive offers great performance for both loading times and copy speeds. The SATA interface should be compatible with most old laptops.

The security suite for self-encryption on the drive is an important factor for business users and the power efficiency of the drive helps to increase the battery life of the laptop. And the 1TB model offers enough room to store a lot of data for normal users.