This review is of a Kingston SSDNow M.2 SATA SSD 240GB drive which was provided by Kingston for review purposes.

Intro

My second Kingston review this month and coincidentally, the second Kingston thing I’ve ever had! This time we’re taking a look at one of Kingston’s M.2 SSD’s, marketed at system builders although available to all.

M.2 occupies a slightly odd place on the drive connection method pantheon for me. For home computing I’d been stuck on physical platter based drives for years, although I’d had enough SSD based laptops to know what kind of performance I was missing out on. The thing is that I didn’t really do huge amounts of gaming on PC until the last few years so up until this point, the massively higher cost per GB just wasn’t something I was prepared to pay to save a few seconds on boot up.

As such, I only really took the SSD plunge at home properly last year with a Samsung 850 Evo 1TB drive. It’s a great drive and boot times are of course the highly noticeable improvement. Game loading times are also decreased, but as time marches ever onwards and games get continually larger, even this I’ve noticed has occasionally had me sitting around longer than I’d hoped I would be at game loading screens.

Drive Connections

So SSD’s are great, but at the same time I also have the feeling that we’re reaching the limits of SSD performance in a standard form factor. The Kingston is an M.2 drive (formerly known as the so called “Next Generation Form Factor” or NGFF) which definitely fills a need for the ultra-compact laptop segment of the market. What it doesn’t really do though is bring any extra speed to the party, unless you’re choosing carefully. For that, you need either an M.2 drive which uses PCIE rather than SATA, or a straightforward PCIE SSD.

Ahhh for the good old days of IDE and that was it! You got your platter drive and got the one with the highest RPM you could and would be damn well happy with it! I know I’m a bit of a fossil but there we go. Now of course, we have SATA drives, and PCIE drives. But besides that, we have SATA connectors, M.2 connectors and PCIE connectors. If you have a SATA connector, it’s a SATA drive, simple right? Then at the other end of the spectrum, you have a PCIE card with an SSD on it. Also easy, it’s a PCIE SSD and will be fast as blazes. But M.2 sits in the middle and has access to both SATA speed connections and PCIE speed connections.

That can be a bit tricky so be careful. I get it that M.2 is useful for Ultrabooks or Air branded machinery but that’s not the entire market. Then you have the PCIE cards which are super fast but not the most practical in a laptop or small form factor case. In theory then, M.2 is a kind of best of both worlds, but personally I can’t help but feel that the industry is lacking a decent trick here. My motherboard was a pretty pricey MSI X99S XPower AC and only came with a single M.2 slot. Certainly in a machine built around this, I’d like to be able to easily put multiple drives. So after the M.2 I’m then reduced to either SATA or PCIE.

Of course these days, Intel chooses to differentiate its CPU’s with not just core counts and clock speeds but also with… (yup, you guessed it!), number of PCIE lanes! So if you’re a multi-gpu gamer of some ilk and have limited lanes available or no more PCIE slots spare for whatever reason, you’re going to be relegated to plain old SATA. Which means loading screens. Which is probably what you were hoping to avoid by going SSD in the first place.

So there we have the conundrum. Personally, I still like the enclosed drive for several reasons we’ll come to later. I don’t want to really have to use PCIE to get super fast performance out of my SSD. Similarly, as good as M.2 has the potential to be if you get an M.2 PCIE SSD, it still smacks to me of a tactical solution to a strategic problem.

I don’t religiously follow hard drive technology and connections. So perhaps I’m missing some option which is on the horizon but to me it seems like PCIE SSD is the next standard due to the speeds it can achieve and that more and more of these drives are appearing regularly. If this is to become yet another interplay and consideration in balancing a system build out then fine, but it seems a compromise too far for me and I hope we have some new connection/transport technology which will allow us faster speeds than SATA today with multiple drives which doesn’t use PCIE slots or lanes.

The Kingston is an M.2 SATA drive so I can understand the system builder aim. I would have thought most people who want an M.2 in a desktop would opt for a PCIE to get access to the speed in something that is probably safer kept out of a PCIE slot, particularly if you regularly dive into your PC.

Onto the review then.

In The Box

I say in the “box”, but really what I mean here is what I would normally consider to be a RAM holder. Pretty sure that’s what it is, with an extra, smaller plastic holder placed inside it which fits the M.2 form factor. Underneath the insert is a small leaflet explaining about static and your warranty.

Other than the drive itself, that’s pretty much your lot! Time to try this bad boy out.

Installation

So my first ever M.2 installation was fairly unremarkable. Anti-static wristband at the ready, it’s time to install!

After a bit of poking about, I see part of the M.2 slot underneath the graphics card. Hmm, I’ve read that M.2’s can put out a bit of heat. Better shift the GPU up a slot just in case.

The SSD slides into place easily and naturally comes to rest with no pressure at an upward angle of about 30-40 degrees from the motherboard. Gently pushing it down I then see the tiny securing screw rather than a clip of some sort so remove the drive and take out the screw.

Putting the SSD back in and now I face a bit of a problem. The screw is so tiny it’s difficult to align it easily and screw it back it. A couple of careful attempts later and the drive is secured.

Performance Testing

One thing I would say before you look at the numbers below. It’s worth noting that synthetic benchmarks don’t always mirror real world performance. This is quite evident in the final test I do with a large file transfer which yields surprising results!

Kingston claim some reasonable SATA performance numbers with Read up to 550MB/s and Write up to 520MB/s. For our tests, I’ll be using the following test bench:

CPU: Intel Core i7-5960X

Motherboard: MSI X99S XPower AC

PSU: eVGA SuperNOVA 1200 P2

Comparison drives: Samsung 850 Evo 1TB SATA SSD, Western Digital Black 4TB 7200RPM.

RAM: 32GB Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 2400MHz

And yes, you saw that right. I’m including a proper old school platter based HDD in these tests (what can I say, I’m a patient guy!) just in case we have any HDD stalwarts out there aching for yet more evidence they should make the jump.

Crystal Disk Mark 5

The ever present Crystal DM5 is the first test up in our suite. The results are pretty solid from the Kingston on the read front, slightly outperforming stated on the read front but seem surprisingly down on the write speed. This isn’t to say it’s slow (check out the HDD for that!), but the Samsung is performing much more in line with stated performance figures. Bringing up the rear in every single performance measure is the WD Black of course.

 

 

 

Samsung Magician

Samsung Magician shows a similar result. With a slight reversal in that the Kingston is actually beating the Samsung in its own software for both the sequential and random reads. On the write speeds though, the 850 Evo is a clear winner, with the WD Black as expected, bringing up the rear in all performance categories.

 

 

 

AS SSD

In our last synthetic benchmark, we use the AS SSD benchmark. Here is where I experience the pain. AS SSD simulates a much more intensive workload than the others and the HDD takes a long time to bench. The Kingston seems to again slightly outperform the Samsung on read speeds, although the write speeds again drop the ball from the 850 Evo. The WD Black puts in a heroic performance (as do I!) and after what must be an hour or more spits out a measly score!

What’s interesting here is that the lead for the Kingston in the Read score is enough to give it an overall points victory over the Samsung according to AS. This must mean that the score is heavily skewed towards the 4k-64Thrd test (which is referring to a 4k size read with a stack of 64 such requests at once).

 

 

 

Transfer Speed

Copying a single 30GB (shadowplay at 4k, what can I say??) file from the 850 Evo to the Kingston M.2, we see what we broadly expect from the benchmark results. After an initial burst of keeping up with the incoming data, the Kingston becomes the slight bottleneck in the copy process and the Samsung (Disk 0 in the Task Manager) is never particularly pushed hard to keep data flowing while the Kingston (Disk 2) is at capacity.

 

Samsung to Kingston disk usage...

Where things get really surprising, is in the next test. I wondered how the Kingston would manage feeding data to the (benchmarked) faster Samsung if I reversed the copy. So I deleted the source directory on the 850 Evo and copied the directory back.

What a startling result!

Initially, the Samsung does as expected and starts writing data at a higher rate than the Kingston did. Both drives are basically at maximum capacity (both read and write). However, a little over halfway through the test, the Samsung drops the ball. Where by the end of the test, the Kingston was still getting rates roughly representative of its benchmark results (316MB/s in the screenshot), the Samsung rate nosedives down to 254MB/s!

As you can see from the task manager, Disk 2 (Kingston) usage drops off massively while the Samsung is still showing max usage.

Kingston to Samsung

Wrapping Up

Well, let’s get the easy one out of the way. The WD Black, as good a drive as it is, definitely shows us that the HDD has had its day as a performance option. So far, so standard.

But what of the Kingston? On the face of the usual benchmark testing, it would seem to be at a small to medium disadvantage compared to the Samsung. Most of the tests put it at roughly similar performance levels or lagging behind. The Samsung is a great drive, no doubt, but I was genuinely surprised at the result of the reverse copy test. I ran some other tests to make sure it wasn't a fluke somehow and the same thing happened. This isn't to say that the drive outright beats the 850 Evo in all real world scenarios, of course this isn't the case, but given the large file transfer result, I must say I'm surprised that the Evo's performance dropped off that much.

So, the bottom line here. The Kingston is a decently performing M.2 (SATA based) SSD. Of course it doesn’t overcome the gripes I had earlier on in the article about a multi-drive super fast SSD based format, but that’s not what it’s meant to do. It’s a good drive and as I’ve come to expect from Kingston recently, a solid and consistent product.

Reviewed at $100.82 (Amazon US) and £79.91 (Amazon UK).

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