Kingston UV500 SATA SSD Review – Self-Encrypting Drive

By Nathan Kirsch

ATTO & CrystalDiskMark

ATTO v3.05

ATTO is one of the oldest drive benchmarks still being used today and is still very relevant in the SSD world. ATTO measures transfers across a specific volume length. It measures raw transfer rates for both reads and writes and places the data into graphs that can be very easily interpreted. The test was run with the default runs of 0.5KB through 64MB transfer sizes with the total length being 256MB.

Benchmark Results: Kingston rates that all of the UV500 series of SATA III SSDs will reach up to 520 MB/s on sequential reads. We were able to hit at least 530 MB/s on the four Kingston UV500 drives that we have and the performance curve was pretty normal looking. It’s always good to exceed the manufactures specifications when it comes to speed!

Benchmark Results: When it comes to sequential write performance the UV500 120GB is rated at 320 MB/s and the other capacities are rated at up to 500 MB/s. We were able to get the UV500 120GB drive up over 360MB/s and the other drives easily topped the 500 MB/s mark. The sequential performance of the drives was particularly choppy on the UV500 960GB drive for some reason. We changed SATA III cables and SATA III ports on the ASUS Z370 motherboard that we use for testing and the results remained the same. We shared our results with Kingston and they are looking into our test results with Marvell.

CrystalDiskMark 6.0.0 x64

CrystalDiskMark is a small benchmark utility for drives and enables rapid measurement of sequential and random read/write speeds. Note that CDM only supports Native Command Queuing (NCQ) with a queue depth of 32 (as noted) and shows the highest score of five runs.

CystalDiskmark – Kingston UV500:

Benchmark Results: The Kingston UV500 series is rated at 520 MB/s read for all the capacities available and we were able to reach that on the Sequential Read test at Queue Depth (QD) 32. The UV500 120GB drive is rated at 320 MB/s write and the 240GB and larger drives are rated at 500 MB/s write. We were only able to hit 192 MB/s sequential write on the 120GB drive, but we were able to reach well beyond 500 MB/s on the other three capacities.

Let’s look at some other benchmarks!