Kingston SM2280S3 120GB M.2 SATA SSD Review
Final Thoughts & Conclusions
For the Kingston SM2280S3 120GB (1GB byte = 1,000,000,000 bytes) drive, we find the user accessible data capacity to be 111GiB (1Gib = 1,073,741,824 bytes) which is typical for a drive with 128GB of NAND on board.
The M.2 form factor is exciting because the PCIe capable versions won’t be bottle-necked by the SATA III interface as long as the drive itself is capable of reaching beyond those speeds. In the case of the Kingston SM2280 M.2 drive, the interface is limited to SATA III speeds and that’s no real hardship as the drive only seemed to reach this plateau on sequential reads on one benchmark. This scenario really rarely every happens for large amounts of data in real world use and even then, it’s for very short bursts. Still, we have no real complaints about the drive’s performance as it matched or exceeded numbers we expected based on the published specifications of 550MB/s reads and 520MB/s writes on compressible data and 500MB/s reads and 330MB/s writes on incompressible data. IOPS performance was decent but there’s definitely room for improvement. The only glaring weak spot we saw was in the consistency test where the performance dropped to HDD levels during the degraded and steady state phases of the test but did rebound nicely in recovery which is a critical piece. Really, this represents performance under extreme conditions that most users would never see unless they consistently keep their drive nearly full so it shouldn’t detract from the overall performance picture.
Right now, we don’t have a method in place to directly test power usage for M.2 drives but the rated specifications of 0.09W idle and 2.86W max aren’t horrible but there are definitely other drives out there that come in considerably lower. However, the difference will generally have very little impact in overall battery life for host machines. If you are needing a drive larger than 120GB, you are out of luck as that’s the only capacity available at this time. [Editors Note: On August 11th 2014 Kingston released a 240GB version] We’ve been able to find it online for as low as $88.99 shipped which comes out to roughly $0.74 per GB which is pretty much median pricing right now for 2.5″ drives but there aren’t a lot of M.2 drives on the market yet to compare it to from a cost perspective.
Overall, the SM2280 is a nice little M.2 drive and since there aren’t a flood of these on the market yet, doesn’t have a lot of competition. This is one of the first M.2 drive we’ve tested so as we get more in, we’ll be able to see how well it stacks up against others directly. Not being an enthusiast level drive we wouldn’t expect to see it topping the performance charts. In the ranks of all SATA III SSDs we’ve tested, it’s about average in performance and features and is priced as such so we can certainly say that those looking for an M.2 drive should be happy with one of these running the storage show as long as their hardware supports it.
Legit Bottom Line: The Kingston SM2280S3 M.2 drive is a very capable drive but limited to just the 120GB capacity at this time [Editors Note: On August 11th 2014 Kingston released a 240GB version]. Those with motherboard slots for M.2 may want to check compatibility before purchasing.