Kingston KC2500 1TB NVMe SSD Review

By Nathan Kirsch

Final Thoughts & Conclusions

At the end of the day the Kingston KC2500 appears to be one of the fastest PCIe Gen 3.0 based NVMe drives on the market today. The pairing of the Silicon Motion SM2262EN controller with Kioxia’s 96-Layer BiCS4 TLC NAND Flash memory seems to perform well. We came close to the drives rated speeds of 3500 MB/s read and 2900 MB/s write in CrystalDiskMark and it performed better than most in all of the benchmarks. The benchmark that stood out the most was the level load times on Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers where the KC2500 was the 3rd fastest NAND based drive that we have ever tested.

The warranty on the KC2500 is top notch with a 5-year limited warranty and the 1TB drive that we tested in this review has an endurance rating of 600 TBW. One also needs to keep in mind that this drive has XTS-AES 256 bit hardware-based encryption that might be useful down the road as well.

Kingston KC2500 1TB SSD Installed on AMD X570 Motherboard

When it comes to pricing that is where the Kingston KC2500 is going to have a tough time. Right now the KC2500 is available in the U.S. market through resellers only. We were able to find the KC2500 series online through major e-tailers like Amazon and Newegg, but only through third-party sellers. The price of the KC2500 1TB model is currently about $230 shipped. That price makes it about $39 more than the Kingston KC2000 1TB ($188 shipped), $92 more than the HP SSD EX950 1TB ($135 shipped), and $87 more than the ADATA SX8200 Pro 1TB ($140 shipped). All four of these drives use the Silicon Motion SM2262EN controller.

  • Kingston KC2500 250GB – SKC2500M8/250G – $74.76 shipped ($0.30 per GB)
  • Kingston KC2500 500GB – SKC2500M8/500G – $127.25 shipped ($0.25 per GB)
  • Kingston KC2500 1TB – SKC2500M8/1000G – $226.09 shipped ($0.23 per GB)
  • Kingston KC2500 2TB – SKC2500M8/2000G – $421.99 shipped ($0.21 per GB)

So, at the end of the day the Kingston KC2500 is a fantastic drive and delivers an exceptional user experience. The move to BiCS4 shows that the company cares about their high-performance KC series and wanted to deliver a new model that was able to take advantage of the latest advances!

Legit Bottom Line: The Kingston KC2500 1TB SSD performed well, but right now can only be found through third-party sellers on major e-tailers that are selling it at higher than expected price points.