Kingston A2000 1TB SSD Review

Anvil Storage Utilities

Anvil Storage Utilities 1.1.0

Along with the move to a new platform, we decided to make a change in one of the benchmarks. There’s a relatively new benchmark called Anvil Storage Utilities that is in beta but close to production. It’s a very powerful tool that measures performance through a variety of tests which can be customized. Since some of the tests more or less duplicate what we get from other benchmarks we use already, we decided to use the IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) testing on 4kb file sizes at a queue depth of 1, 2, 3 and 4. IOPS performance is something SSD makers tout quite a bit but we generally don’t do a lot of IOPS testing because frankly a lot of users can’t relate to IOPS metrics as well and it tends to be more meaningful to the enterprise/server crowd. Still, it is another performance indicator with relevance!

Anvil SSD Benchmark with 100% Compression (incompressible data):

Benchmark Results: The Anvil SSD Benchmark showed that with 100% compression (incompressible data) the Kingston A2000 1TB M.2 NVMe drive had an overall score of 10,792.95 points. The drive topped out at 1,846.71 MB/s read and 1,723.91 MB/s write on the sequential performance test with 4MB file sizes. Random 4K QD16 performance hit 128,100 IOPS on read and 269,200 IOPS write.

Here you can see how the Kingston A2000 compares against five other drives tested on the same test platform by quickly looking at the overall score. We were shocked to see the Kingston A2000 edging out the KC2000 by about 100 points on this benchmarking application.

Low queue depth Random 4K read and write performance is super important these days, so we manually ran QD1, QD2, QD3, and QD4 tests and charted the results for you. The Kingston A2000 has about average low queue depth performance as QD1, but does better than most at QD2 and above.