Kingston's KC2000 is a premium performance-oriented SSD that has been around for a while. Kingston's KC2000 is based on Silicon Motion's powerful SM2262EN 8-channel controller and BiCS4 96-layer TLC flash. This is not an uncommon configuration by any means; however, in the case of Kingston, theirs is unique, because Kingston is one of the few retailers that manufacture the SSDs they sell.

One thing we've noticed as of late is that many SSDs are faster when they first hit the market than they are when you buy them after they've been on the market for some time. This performance drop is usually attributable to cost mitigation. We often see production cost-reducing strategies in play that include a reduction in the amount of on SSD DRAM and lower performance flash.

We are mentioning this because Kingston's KC2000 is one of the few that we see doing the opposite - getting faster the longer it is on the market. The KC2000 1TB we have on our test bench today is notably faster than factory specs at launch. We like this because it indicates to us that Kingston is not implementing performance reducing cost mitigation strategies that we see others doing.