Kingston KC1000 NVMe SSD - master sprints
Each technology has its finest hour: the moment when it, like a hurricane, erases previous achievements. For a very long time in our computers, the slowest part was data storage.
We got rid of magnetic pancakes by creating an SSD. From interfaces not intended for such drives - most recently, with the advent of PCI-Express connectivity and the NVMe command set. Now, nothing holds us. Check?
The Kingston KC1000 NVMe PCIe SSD 480GB will take the rap for the world of high-speed drives. Despite its cosmic characteristics, the disk is intended for "home" use. For workstations, too, fit, but not for databases and all that. Games, photo processing, video editing - this is his element, yes.
')
External execution of the drive is standard for the form factor M.2 2280. Dimensions, as follows from the marking, are 80 Ă— 22 Ă— 3.5 mm, weight is only 10 grams. Not that the most important characteristics of an SSD, but who really needs to know?
The hardware stuffing includes the Phison PS5007-E7 controller (in the picture it is, alas, on the other hand, under the sticker) and Toshiba MLC 2D NAND memory chips (TH58TF96DFLBA8C) made on 15-nm technology and located on both sides of the printed circuit board.
The first publications about the development of PS5007-E7 could have been met a couple of years ago, but the actual production and supply to assemblers began only at the end of last year. During this time, Phison'ovtsy dopili firmware and optimized it for work with the standard NVMe-driver from Microsoft, but not to say that they made it perfect. There is still something to work on, and we will surely see fresh firmware with polishing of any elusive bugs, such as a drop in speed when writing blocks of more than 2 MB in size in one case out of 100.
We should also note that the controller installed in the KC1000 easily exceeds the passport specifications. On the official Phison website, the maximum possible data writing speed for the MLC NAND bundle and the PS5007-E7 controller is no more than 1,300 MB / s. On the Kingston website for the KC1000 NVMe PCIe SSD, the speed is already declared at 1600 MB / s, and the real one in some cases is even higher.
Ordinary M.2 drives next to this monster seem thin and empty: no chips from the second side, no powerful strapping.
KC1000 is found in two versions of delivery: basic (just a drive) and extended - with an adapter for a classic PCI-Express. So even if you don’t have a hipster M.2 connector on the motherboard, or the greedy vendor has only unpacked the SATA bus in it - it doesn't matter, the high speeds will not pass by you.
And the bracket for the back panel of ultra-compact cases to boot!
Considering the retail cost of such an adapter and the ridiculous price difference between the bundles (about $ 10), it is doubly pleasant that Kingston took care of the users.
You can diagnose a drive, learn about its status and update the controller firmware using the proprietary utility Kingston SSD Manager . One of the most important indicators for the stable operation of the drive is its operating temperature — when it reaches 75 ° C, the speed may noticeably decrease, but more on that later.
The following configuration was used for testing:
* - Yes, the Cooler Master has such a strange naming of a customizable line. It sounds weird, it looks even weirder, but the glands are ok. ;)
Attention! Kingston KC1000 has an M.2 PCI-Express 3.0 x4 connection interface, and uses the NVMe protocol.
The latter was developed from scratch specifically to achieve low latency and provide parallel access to solid-state drives. It takes into account the explicit parallelism of modern platforms and is able to work with multi-core processors out of the box. The main advantage of NVMe over the classic AHCI protocol is the mechanism for working with queues and signal interruptions.
Classic AHCI devices support only one (1) queue, and there can be no more than 32 commands in it. NVMe supports 65536 queues with a depth of 65536 each. How many times is it more “multi-threaded” you can find yourself :)
The NVMe command set itself is greatly simplified in comparison with ATA and SCSI: first of all, we got rid of the useless SSD instructions sharpened for working with HDD. This made it possible to greatly simplify the logic and further increase the speed of data exchange between the device and the system board.
On your motherboard, M.2 must be unsoldered with B & M or only M keys, since it is with the M key that NVMe drives come out. Kingston KC1000 does not have support for SATA instructions, and you will not be able to insert it into connector M.2 with key B.
To operate at full speed, the disk requires PCI Express 3.0 - support for it appeared in Intel processors starting with socket 2011-3 and 1155. AMD has it - starting with the 990FX chipset, but this is an old line of processors, which has no special meaning to consider. On Ryzen'ah everything will start as it should.
In terms of operating systems, the requirements are simple: Windows 8.1, Linux with kernel 3.1 or later, MacOS High Sierra (10.13). FreeBSD support is still in question: the quality of the drivers is so-so. However, there are not so many workstations for FreeBSD, but on the main operating systems everything is fine.
The drives were mounted as system disks, followed by the installation of Microsoft Windows 10 64-bit OS and updating all drivers to the latest versions. At the time of the tests, the paging file and the hibernation mode were disabled.
Performance measurements were carried out using the following utilities and methods:
The testing method is simple: we make benchmarks, let the disk cool to ambient temperature, repeat the run. Next, 2-3-4 launches try to trace the effect of successive loads. We compare the results, draw conclusions.
All high-performance M.2 disks have one problem: heating. Firstly, the powerful controllers themselves are heated not weakly, and secondly, the location of the connectors on the motherboards makes us doubt the adequacy of the engineers who invented this feature:
Collectors got stuck with sticker orientation. It happens. :)
No, of course, this compact and interesting solution is perfect for all sorts of thin and slender devices, but what to do with such high-performance monsters like the KC1000?
Lock the disc between a hot video card and at least a hot processor, and leave it without blowing? And after all, the radiator on one of the sides will not be super efficient: there are no special air flows in this space, even if the system cooler is specially deployed to blow the disk - it will be in the “dead zone” at the very base. And okay, one drive, in the premium segment there are several such connectors on the motherboard. What to do with the second and third slots that will be blocked by the cooling system of video cards is generally a mystery. Unless to put there capacious and relatively slow drives with M.2 SATA-interface, which are not so sensitive to heat.
In the case of the KC1000, alas, cooling is the cornerstone of all results. Managing your computer to blow off the excess heat - great. No ... Well, the disk will still show impressive results, but they will be far from the maximum. Therefore, the correct orientation of the cooling system, additional radiators and hot air “extractor” - Masthev!
Small files (up to 2 GB) disk copies instantly. Just in an instant. Shortcut longer to create. In real-life tasks with everyday use, the user can count on copying speeds of the order of 800 MB / s - this is simply a terrific figure for a home SSD. 200 GB of Steam library with a bunch of diverse files was duplicated in about 4 minutes.
According to the report of the AIDA64 utility, the peak speed when copying a couple dozen GB is kept at ~ 1700 MB / s, but then everything is not so smooth. Problems begin when copying a huge number of small data. A set of 40 GB of documents, recorded and deleted in a circle, in 6 minutes heats the disc noticeably. Dedicated for blowing the motherboard fan copes, but if it was not ...
For the sake of the purity of the experiment, we repeat the benchmark without cooling. The average speed dropped to 540 MB / s. The very fact of throttling is difficult to deny, but modern SSDs connected via the SATA 6 Gb / s interface even provide such results only in synthetic benchmarks. That already commands respect. And in general, you are not confused by the three-story cooling system on the flagship video card and a pound of copper on the processor. What makes a super speed drive worse? He also wants to work fast.
Testing in CrystalDiskMark allowed not only to achieve the speed characteristics specified by the manufacturer, but also to surpass them in some places.
ATTO Disk Benchmark squeezes out in general all possible juices from the controller and memory. Insane 2200-2300 MB / s sequential write speeds and 2900-3000 MB / s sequential read. But ATTO, unfortunately, shows work in the ideal case - when the system knows that it has an SSD and loads the disk at 100%. The reality, nevertheless, is closer to the testimony of other benchmarks.
The test in AS SSD Benchmark put everything in its place. These are the characteristics you can expect from the new Kingston in real problems:
The average response time of the disk subsystem ranged from 0.036 to 0.038 ms. Slightly different from the stated measured IOPS, (average for tests - 290K reading / 190K record). However, such figures are impressive. Immediately visible is the difference between the drives on the new NVMe 1.2 interface with the Phison PS5007-E7 controller and the drives from last year.
PCMark though the test and middle-aged, but thorough. According to his testing methodology, the drive is gaining quite a decent result for “average hospital loads”.
As a “vital” benchmark, we take a simple set of files. 20 GB of “user data”: half for multimedia, 30% for small things (Office, PDF, small text documents), the rest is one large archive. Let it be a backup.
With the resulting 20-gigabyte array, our KC1000 NVMe PCIe SSD 480GB managed in 15 seconds. To say that it is “fast” is the same as calling the Beatles a good indie rock band. After that, copying the same amount of data on a regular SATA-HDD sobering very quickly. You begin to understand how slow by today's standards are the “classic” discs.
The experience of communicating with SSD Kingston KC1000 is difficult to convey in words. At first you are surprised, then for a long time you show off your acquaintances (and they do not understand what makes your eyes burn and where to look at the screenshots), and then ... Then the most difficult thing. You begin to want everything and everywhere to work as fast as your computer. And here the problems begin ...
KC1000 - insanely fast drive. Once having worked at such speeds, you begin to perceive work with other drives as a trip in time. Year of that way in 2004, with the release of Half-Life 2 and a dollar of 27 each.
If we consider purely domestic and basic work tasks, the KC1000 path is working with large amounts of data. Programmers working with the assembly of software or huge databases will be delighted. Video editors, too, even if the project does not fit entirely into the RAM, it can be promptly loaded from the hard drive and not suffer from multi-second downloads. Photographers and players will be of less benefit - here we are more often faced with limitations of computing power than with constant caching of resources from the disk.
With a properly selected case and cooling drive will delight you every day. Really tangible drawdowns can be achieved only if you constantly operate on huge amounts of data comparable to the total SSD. And this, as we have said, is not quite its class of tasks - there are server drives for this.
The benefit of ensuring a decent existence is not difficult now: most of the flagship motherboards come with radiators for self-sticking on the M.2 drive.
The worst thing about this is price. For the 480 GB version, you will have to pay around 19,000 rubles . However, it is not a pity to pay for such speeds of work. Options for 240 GB is already cheaper: 11 000 rubles . You can buy a disc right now, sales have already started in Russia.
PS: Using this drive makes you intolerant to other people's computers. Everything that you will work on after KC1000 will cause a feeling of relativistic time dilation.
PPS: And until the end of September, a discount of 1000 rubles for the HyperX Alloy FPS keyboard is in effect in the DNS. And yes, do not forget to subscribe to our blog, what if suddenly and on fast SSD discounts will be delivered? ;)
We got rid of magnetic pancakes by creating an SSD. From interfaces not intended for such drives - most recently, with the advent of PCI-Express connectivity and the NVMe command set. Now, nothing holds us. Check?
Champion
The Kingston KC1000 NVMe PCIe SSD 480GB will take the rap for the world of high-speed drives. Despite its cosmic characteristics, the disk is intended for "home" use. For workstations, too, fit, but not for databases and all that. Games, photo processing, video editing - this is his element, yes.
')
External execution of the drive is standard for the form factor M.2 2280. Dimensions, as follows from the marking, are 80 Ă— 22 Ă— 3.5 mm, weight is only 10 grams. Not that the most important characteristics of an SSD, but who really needs to know?
Flaming heart and hot temper
The hardware stuffing includes the Phison PS5007-E7 controller (in the picture it is, alas, on the other hand, under the sticker) and Toshiba MLC 2D NAND memory chips (TH58TF96DFLBA8C) made on 15-nm technology and located on both sides of the printed circuit board.
The first publications about the development of PS5007-E7 could have been met a couple of years ago, but the actual production and supply to assemblers began only at the end of last year. During this time, Phison'ovtsy dopili firmware and optimized it for work with the standard NVMe-driver from Microsoft, but not to say that they made it perfect. There is still something to work on, and we will surely see fresh firmware with polishing of any elusive bugs, such as a drop in speed when writing blocks of more than 2 MB in size in one case out of 100.
We should also note that the controller installed in the KC1000 easily exceeds the passport specifications. On the official Phison website, the maximum possible data writing speed for the MLC NAND bundle and the PS5007-E7 controller is no more than 1,300 MB / s. On the Kingston website for the KC1000 NVMe PCIe SSD, the speed is already declared at 1600 MB / s, and the real one in some cases is even higher.
Ordinary M.2 drives next to this monster seem thin and empty: no chips from the second side, no powerful strapping.
Equipment
KC1000 is found in two versions of delivery: basic (just a drive) and extended - with an adapter for a classic PCI-Express. So even if you don’t have a hipster M.2 connector on the motherboard, or the greedy vendor has only unpacked the SATA bus in it - it doesn't matter, the high speeds will not pass by you.
And the bracket for the back panel of ultra-compact cases to boot!
Considering the retail cost of such an adapter and the ridiculous price difference between the bundles (about $ 10), it is doubly pleasant that Kingston took care of the users.
Vital statistics
You can diagnose a drive, learn about its status and update the controller firmware using the proprietary utility Kingston SSD Manager . One of the most important indicators for the stable operation of the drive is its operating temperature — when it reaches 75 ° C, the speed may noticeably decrease, but more on that later.
Test stand
The following configuration was used for testing:
- Processor: AMD Ryzen 7 1800X (8 cores @ 3.8GHz, 16MB cache memory);
- Cooler: Cooler Master 212 Hyper LED
- Motherboard: ASUS Prime B350-Plus;
- RAM: HyperX Savage [HX428C14SB2K4 / 32] 4 Ă— 8 GB;
- Video adapter: Palit GeForce GTX 1080 Ti JetStream;
- Enclosure: Cooler Master MasterCase 6 * ;
- Power supply: Cooler Master MasterWatt 700 Lite * ;
- Operating system: Microsoft Windows 10 64-bit.
* - Yes, the Cooler Master has such a strange naming of a customizable line. It sounds weird, it looks even weirder, but the glands are ok. ;)
System requirements
Attention! Kingston KC1000 has an M.2 PCI-Express 3.0 x4 connection interface, and uses the NVMe protocol.
The latter was developed from scratch specifically to achieve low latency and provide parallel access to solid-state drives. It takes into account the explicit parallelism of modern platforms and is able to work with multi-core processors out of the box. The main advantage of NVMe over the classic AHCI protocol is the mechanism for working with queues and signal interruptions.
Classic AHCI devices support only one (1) queue, and there can be no more than 32 commands in it. NVMe supports 65536 queues with a depth of 65536 each. How many times is it more “multi-threaded” you can find yourself :)
Hidden text
In the ridiculous one hundred and thirty-four million two hundred and seventeen thousand seven hundred and twenty-eight times.
The NVMe command set itself is greatly simplified in comparison with ATA and SCSI: first of all, we got rid of the useless SSD instructions sharpened for working with HDD. This made it possible to greatly simplify the logic and further increase the speed of data exchange between the device and the system board.
On your motherboard, M.2 must be unsoldered with B & M or only M keys, since it is with the M key that NVMe drives come out. Kingston KC1000 does not have support for SATA instructions, and you will not be able to insert it into connector M.2 with key B.
About compatibility with hardware and software
To operate at full speed, the disk requires PCI Express 3.0 - support for it appeared in Intel processors starting with socket 2011-3 and 1155. AMD has it - starting with the 990FX chipset, but this is an old line of processors, which has no special meaning to consider. On Ryzen'ah everything will start as it should.
In terms of operating systems, the requirements are simple: Windows 8.1, Linux with kernel 3.1 or later, MacOS High Sierra (10.13). FreeBSD support is still in question: the quality of the drivers is so-so. However, there are not so many workstations for FreeBSD, but on the main operating systems everything is fine.
Test conditions
The drives were mounted as system disks, followed by the installation of Microsoft Windows 10 64-bit OS and updating all drivers to the latest versions. At the time of the tests, the paging file and the hibernation mode were disabled.
Performance measurements were carried out using the following utilities and methods:
- ATTO Disk Benchmark v2.46;
- AS SSD Benchmark 1.7.4739.38088;
- CrystalDiskMark 5.2.2;
- PCMark 8;
- copying a set of files of various sizes.
Benchmarks
The testing method is simple: we make benchmarks, let the disk cool to ambient temperature, repeat the run. Next, 2-3-4 launches try to trace the effect of successive loads. We compare the results, draw conclusions.
Speed ​​and stability
All high-performance M.2 disks have one problem: heating. Firstly, the powerful controllers themselves are heated not weakly, and secondly, the location of the connectors on the motherboards makes us doubt the adequacy of the engineers who invented this feature:
Collectors got stuck with sticker orientation. It happens. :)
No, of course, this compact and interesting solution is perfect for all sorts of thin and slender devices, but what to do with such high-performance monsters like the KC1000?
Lock the disc between a hot video card and at least a hot processor, and leave it without blowing? And after all, the radiator on one of the sides will not be super efficient: there are no special air flows in this space, even if the system cooler is specially deployed to blow the disk - it will be in the “dead zone” at the very base. And okay, one drive, in the premium segment there are several such connectors on the motherboard. What to do with the second and third slots that will be blocked by the cooling system of video cards is generally a mystery. Unless to put there capacious and relatively slow drives with M.2 SATA-interface, which are not so sensitive to heat.
In the case of the KC1000, alas, cooling is the cornerstone of all results. Managing your computer to blow off the excess heat - great. No ... Well, the disk will still show impressive results, but they will be far from the maximum. Therefore, the correct orientation of the cooling system, additional radiators and hot air “extractor” - Masthev!
Subjective feelings
Small files (up to 2 GB) disk copies instantly. Just in an instant. Shortcut longer to create. In real-life tasks with everyday use, the user can count on copying speeds of the order of 800 MB / s - this is simply a terrific figure for a home SSD. 200 GB of Steam library with a bunch of diverse files was duplicated in about 4 minutes.
According to the report of the AIDA64 utility, the peak speed when copying a couple dozen GB is kept at ~ 1700 MB / s, but then everything is not so smooth. Problems begin when copying a huge number of small data. A set of 40 GB of documents, recorded and deleted in a circle, in 6 minutes heats the disc noticeably. Dedicated for blowing the motherboard fan copes, but if it was not ...
For the sake of the purity of the experiment, we repeat the benchmark without cooling. The average speed dropped to 540 MB / s. The very fact of throttling is difficult to deny, but modern SSDs connected via the SATA 6 Gb / s interface even provide such results only in synthetic benchmarks. That already commands respect. And in general, you are not confused by the three-story cooling system on the flagship video card and a pound of copper on the processor. What makes a super speed drive worse? He also wants to work fast.
Accurate measurements
Testing in CrystalDiskMark allowed not only to achieve the speed characteristics specified by the manufacturer, but also to surpass them in some places.
ATTO Disk Benchmark squeezes out in general all possible juices from the controller and memory. Insane 2200-2300 MB / s sequential write speeds and 2900-3000 MB / s sequential read. But ATTO, unfortunately, shows work in the ideal case - when the system knows that it has an SSD and loads the disk at 100%. The reality, nevertheless, is closer to the testimony of other benchmarks.
The test in AS SSD Benchmark put everything in its place. These are the characteristics you can expect from the new Kingston in real problems:
The average response time of the disk subsystem ranged from 0.036 to 0.038 ms. Slightly different from the stated measured IOPS, (average for tests - 290K reading / 190K record). However, such figures are impressive. Immediately visible is the difference between the drives on the new NVMe 1.2 interface with the Phison PS5007-E7 controller and the drives from last year.
PCMark 8
PCMark though the test and middle-aged, but thorough. According to his testing methodology, the drive is gaining quite a decent result for “average hospital loads”.
Copying files within the OS
As a “vital” benchmark, we take a simple set of files. 20 GB of “user data”: half for multimedia, 30% for small things (Office, PDF, small text documents), the rest is one large archive. Let it be a backup.
With the resulting 20-gigabyte array, our KC1000 NVMe PCIe SSD 480GB managed in 15 seconds. To say that it is “fast” is the same as calling the Beatles a good indie rock band. After that, copying the same amount of data on a regular SATA-HDD sobering very quickly. You begin to understand how slow by today's standards are the “classic” discs.
Balance of characteristics and price of issue
The experience of communicating with SSD Kingston KC1000 is difficult to convey in words. At first you are surprised, then for a long time you show off your acquaintances (and they do not understand what makes your eyes burn and where to look at the screenshots), and then ... Then the most difficult thing. You begin to want everything and everywhere to work as fast as your computer. And here the problems begin ...
Virtues
- Insane linear read and write speeds;
- Native work with NVMe-driver Windows and installation without dancing with a tambourine, flash drive and drivers;
- Quite adequate for such speeds cost, in fact and speeds, competitors - server drives, not desktop drives. And there are very different prices.
disadvantages
- The drive needs good cooling for continuous operation at maximum speeds;
- Power consumption makes it an undesirable guest in laptops and supercompact PCs, assembled "right next" to the power of the PSU;
In total
KC1000 - insanely fast drive. Once having worked at such speeds, you begin to perceive work with other drives as a trip in time. Year of that way in 2004, with the release of Half-Life 2 and a dollar of 27 each.
If we consider purely domestic and basic work tasks, the KC1000 path is working with large amounts of data. Programmers working with the assembly of software or huge databases will be delighted. Video editors, too, even if the project does not fit entirely into the RAM, it can be promptly loaded from the hard drive and not suffer from multi-second downloads. Photographers and players will be of less benefit - here we are more often faced with limitations of computing power than with constant caching of resources from the disk.
With a properly selected case and cooling drive will delight you every day. Really tangible drawdowns can be achieved only if you constantly operate on huge amounts of data comparable to the total SSD. And this, as we have said, is not quite its class of tasks - there are server drives for this.
The benefit of ensuring a decent existence is not difficult now: most of the flagship motherboards come with radiators for self-sticking on the M.2 drive.
Where can one buy?
The worst thing about this is price. For the 480 GB version, you will have to pay around 19,000 rubles . However, it is not a pity to pay for such speeds of work. Options for 240 GB is already cheaper: 11 000 rubles . You can buy a disc right now, sales have already started in Russia.
PS: Using this drive makes you intolerant to other people's computers. Everything that you will work on after KC1000 will cause a feeling of relativistic time dilation.
PPS: And until the end of September, a discount of 1000 rubles for the HyperX Alloy FPS keyboard is in effect in the DNS. And yes, do not forget to subscribe to our blog, what if suddenly and on fast SSD discounts will be delivered? ;)
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/370781/
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