Page 53 - PCWorld (September 2019)

The A2000s use a Silicon
CrystalDiskMark 6
Motion (SMI) 2263
(MBps)
controller and 96-layer TLC
NAND. The NAND is all on 2,200
Sequential Write 4K 2,354
one side of the board, (Q=32, T=1) 2,717
making it thin enough for
2,276
nearly any laptop. Caching is
Sequential Read 4K 2,474
done by treating the TLC as (Q=32, T=1) 3,525
SLC, or one-bit NAND.
Kingston A2000 Kingston KC2000
Writing a single bit is far
faster than writing three. Samsung 970 Pro
Kingston offers a nice LONGER BARS INDICATE BET TER PERFORMANCE

five-year warranty on the Though it can’t match the mighty Samsung 970 Pro, the A2000
A2000, though the TBW is still easily fast enough for the average user.
(TeraBytes that may be Written)

ratings aren’t large for this day
and age: 150TB per 250GB of
capacity. However, that’s more

than the average user will write
in 10 years. TBW ratings are

used to give a company an out
in case someone decides to
use a consumer drive like

the A2000 in a high-
transaction server.

PERFORMANCE
This was the second run of our 450GB write test. The A2000 slowed
As I said up top, the A2000 is
down much earlier on the first run. The inconsistency at the beginning
a good performer, if not quite is likely due to the drive adjusting the amount of cache.
on a par with the fastest

drives out there. I tested the 1TB version, and 250GB version is rated to write at only
Kingston rates the 500GB for the same 1,100MBps maximum.
2.1GBps write performance. However, The 1TB version doesn’t slow down

because it has fewer chips to write across, the during moderately long writes, as evidenced

SEPTEMBER 2019 PCWorld 53