Performance
The performance has been tested on the Intel Rocket Lake-S platform, which contains the i7-11700K CPU, MSI Z590I Unify motherboard, 32GB HyperX FURY RGB DDR4-3600 memory kit, and Abkoncore 850W 80+ Gold PSU.
All tests were performed in Windows 10 Pro x64 environment with the latest updates.
There are three setups: a single DC500M 1.92TB SSD, two SSD in RAID0, and two SSD in RAID1. These are the most popular configurations. However, I assume that RAID1 is the most interesting as it’s recommended for professional work and data storage solutions, even at home.
As usual, in my storage reviews, I will start with the ATTO Disk Benchmark. It’s one of the most popular storage benchmarks, and results are easy to compare at home.
ATTO Disk Benchmark
A single DC500M 1.92TB SSD performs as expected. We could see up to 534MB/s read and 507MB/s write in the ATTO benchmark with a usual slightly lower bandwidth. This is a bit more than we could see on the fastest SATA SSD so far.
In the RAID0 mode, the DC500M SSDs are scaling well, and we can see nearly double the bandwidth.
More important for me is how SSD is acting in RAID1 mode. I won’t hide that I’m surprised to see a double read bandwidth as usually, SSDs in RAID1 mode perform not much better than a single drive. Here we have a read bandwidth result close to RAID0.
CrystalDiskMark
CrystalDiskMark is already showing higher sequential read and write than Kingston declares it. We could reach nearly 560MB/s read and 530MB/s write. 560MB/s is about the maximum possible on SATAIII SSD. Random operations are also high for the SATA SSD. We can’t compare these results with M.2 PCIe SSD, but they’re pretty respectable even then.
In RAID0, there is one more surprise. I assume it’s a matter of caching as nearly 1270MB/s in sequential read is more than the SATAIII bus can handle. It also proves that in some situations, we can expect higher performance than expected.
Worth noting is that all other transfers are scaling well, and in most operations, we could achieve double the single drive performance.
In RAID1, results are again surprisingly good. The maximum bandwidth is out of the scale! Random low queue 4K operations are very high, even though they usually are worse in RAID modes. Some readers may say it’s only SATA SSD, but these results are amazing. I expected about 550MB/s maximum read with about 20MB/s random 4K Q1T1 while our results are up to twice as good!
PCMark 10
PCMark 10 is very demanding but simulates a higher load during daily work, giving us important information about storage performance.
As far as single drive performance is good but not very high, RAID0 and RAID1 results are exceptional. It’s hard to believe, but our PCMark 10 results on two drives are as high or even higher than the results that we have made on M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD. You wouldn’t think it’s possible, but clearly, Kingston did a good job as we haven’t seen such high results on any consumer series SATA SSD. If you ask what makes datacenter/enterprise SSD worth the additional money, here is your answer.
Below also RAID1 results, which are not much worse than those in RAID0 mode.
Anvil’s Storage Utilities
Anvil’s Storage Utilities, as usual, give us lower results than we can see in the SSD specification, but here we will focus on IOPS.
A single DC500M can go as high as 85K IOPS in Anvil’s benchmark. The same results are for read and write operations.
Once we set RAID0, then we can go up to 157K IOPS.
RAID1 also performs well with 95K read and 84K write IOPS. It’s significantly more than any previously tested SATA SSD.
PassMark Performance Test
In the Performance Test, I wanted to focus on the maximum IOPS for the single drive to confirm the specifications. In fact, the DC500M 1.92TB reaches or even passes declared 95K read IOPS while in write, it reaches over 83K IOPS what is much more than the declared 75K.
In the end, one more result confirming the amazing RAID1 performance of two DC500M SSD.
Kingston KC2500 should perform great in any environment, so I’m sure that all kinds of users will be satisfied with this drive. 1TB capacity is enough for any gaming PC and also workstations. High IOPS are especially helpful for high workloads and mixed load environments, so really demanding games or professional use.
