Ssd kingston vs samsung: Kingston A400 vs Samsung 860 Evo

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High-end SATA SSD shootout: Samsung 860 Pro vs.

Kingston DC500M

Enlarge / The Samsung 860 Pro and Kingston DC500M are loaded up in the Storage Hot Rod’s hot-swap trays and ready for battle.

Jim Salter

Today, we’re going to put to good use some of what we covered last year in our Storage Fundamentals series—specifically, we’ll use fio to test two competing high-end SATA SSDs.

Each disk has its high points and its low points, and we’ll cover both in detail as well as giving you some handy charts to compare the two directly.

Samsung 860 Pro 1TB

Enlarge / The Samsung 860 Pro is a well-respected prosumer drive, tending to lead charts in both performance and endurance.

Samsung

Samsung’s 860 Pro is a staple of the prosumer industry. The 860 Pro marries raw, screaming performance to solid firmware and high write endurance while remaining accessible for consumers and small businesses. I’ve personally deployed hundreds of the 840 Pro, 850 Pro, and 860 Pro series of drives to good effect and with no complaints—which is more than I can say for quite a few of Samsung’s competitors.

The 860 Pro is a little more expensive than its kid brother, the 860 EVO. That’s because the EVO is cheaper—and the specifications Samsung chooses to publish make it look as fast—or faster. The reality can be different, depending on your use case. The EVO is a TLC drive with a fast MLC cache, while the Pro is entirely MLC.

For lightweight consumer workloads that don’t burn through the EVO’s MLC cache, the EVO really can be as fast as the Pro. But heavy, sustained write workloads will fall off a cliff—which is literally what the performance-over-time graphs look like—once they’ve filled the cache and have to fall back to writing directly to the EVO’s slower TLC main media.

By contrast, the Pro performs reliably and sustainably under massive write workloads for as long as you need it to—the entire drive is fast, so there’s no cliff to fall from. The Pro also has much higher write endurance, and for the same reason. The TLC-based 860 EVO 1TB is rated for 600TBW (TeraBytes Written), whereas the 860 Pro 1TB we’re testing today is rated for 1,200TBW.

The 1TB 860 Pro we’re testing today is available on Amazon for $200 with Prime shipping. (The 2TB version—more comparable in size to the 1.92TB Kingston—runs for $360.)

Kingston DC500M 1.92TB

Enlarge / Kingston’s DC500 series of drives comes in two variants—a less-expensive 500R «read optimized» version and the heavier-duty 500M «mixed workload» version we’re testing today.

Kingston

The Kingston DC500M is something that mere consumers—or even «prosumers»—haven’t traditionally gotten to play with very often. Unlike the Samsung, the DC500M is a true data center-grade drive, featuring power-loss protection (PLP) and serious quality of service (QoS) that helps the DC500M ensure fairness between tons of processes trying to access the drive at the same time.

The Kingston is also rated for even higher write endurance than the Samsung 860 Pro. Kingston designs the DC500M series for 0.5 Drive Writes Per Day (DWPD). The 960GB version of the DC500M is therefore rated for a whopping 2278TBW, and the 1. 92TB version we’re testing today is rated for 4555TBW—nearly double the endurance of the Samsung drives.

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For some reason, all of Kingston’s data center drives on Amazon are listed in Italian—despite being sold by a wide variety of American vendors. One of the larger vendors there offers the 1.92TB DC500M for $347 with Prime shipping. If the Italian-language descriptions bother you, you can buy the drive at Newegg instead—we also found it listed by a reputable vendor there for the same $347 price.

Raw performance

• 4K random read is a painful workload for all drives—even SSDs. Both of these SATA SSDs do well on this workload, though the Samsung is significantly quicker.

  Jim Salter

• 4K random writes appear to be faster than reads—but that’s because the OS is allowed to reorder them and commit them in large batches.

  Jim Salter

• 1.SSD cache

  DRAM memory uses high-speed RAM as a buffer/cache, performance is faster than non-DRAM SSDs that use slower NAND flash or system RAM (HMB).0003

  2.This is an NVMe SSD

  ✖Kingston A400 480GB

  ✖Samsung 860 Evo 4TB 2.5″

  NVMe SSDs use the PCIe interface, which has a higher bandwidth than the SATA interface. This results in a much faster read speed

  3.M.2 Form Factor

  ✖Kingston A400 480GB

  ✖Samsung 860 Evo 4TB 2.5″

  M.2 SSDs are installed directly into the motherboard. Compared to 2.5-inch SSDs, they are much easier to install and do not require the user to connect and run cables for data and power.

  4.built-in memory

  4000GB

  Built-in memory is the built-in space for storing system data, applications and user data in the device. With more internal storage, you can store more files and apps on your device.

  5. SSD Storage Type

  The storage type determines how many bits of data are written to each memory cell. These storage types include SLC (one bit per cell), MLC (two bits per cell), and TLC (three bits per cell). The fewer bits written to each cell, the higher the speed and reliability.

  6. PCI Express (PCIe) version

  Unknown. Help us offer a price. (Kingston A400 480GB)

  Unknown. Help us offer a price. (Samsung 860 Evo 4TB 2.5″)

  PCI Express (PCIe) is a high speed expansion card standard that is used to connect a computer to its peripherals. Newer versions support higher bandwidth and provide higher performance.

  7.Channels controller

  The controller is the processor that controls the functions of the SSD. The number of channels indicates the number of memory chips that this controller can access at the same time. As a general rule, the more channels an SSD controller has, the better the performance.

  8.Terabytes Written (TBW)

  Terabytes Written (TBW) is a measure of the lifespan of an SSD and is often covered by the manufacturer’s warranty. A higher TBW may indicate greater reliability over a longer period of time.

  9.mean time between failures

  1million hours

  1.5million hours

  MTBF is the manufacturer’s estimate of the average time a device can run before it fails.

  Kingston A400 960GB vs Samsung 870 QVO 1TB: What is the difference?

  1.SSD cache

  Unknown. Help us offer a price. (Kingston A400 960GB)

  DRAM drive

  Solid state drives/SSDs with DRAM flash memory use high-speed RAM as a buffer/cache. Performance is faster than non-DRAM SSDs that use slower NAND flash or system RAM (HMB).

  2. This is NVMe SSD

  ✖Kingston A400 960GB

  ✖Samsung 870 QVO 1TB

  NVMe SSDs use PCIe interface, which has higher bandwidth than SATA interface. This results in much faster read/write speeds compared to SSDs using the SATA interface.

  3.M.2 Form Factor

  ✖Kingston A400 960GB

  ✖Samsung 870 QVO 1TB

  M.2 SSDs install directly into the motherboard. Compared to 2.5-inch SSDs, they are much easier to install and do not require the user to connect and run cables for data and power.

  4.built-in memory

  1000GB

  Built-in memory is the built-in space for storing system data, applications and user data in the device. With more internal storage, you can store more files and apps on your device.

  5. SSD Storage Type

  The storage type determines how many bits of data are written to each memory cell. These storage types include SLC (one bit per cell), MLC (two bits per cell), and TLC (three bits per cell). The fewer bits written to each cell, the higher the speed and reliability.

  6. PCI Express (PCIe) version

  Unknown. Help us offer a price. (Kingston A400 960GB)

  Unknown. Help us offer a price. (Samsung 870 QVO 1TB)

  PCI Express (PCIe) is a high speed expansion card standard that is used to connect a computer to its peripherals. Newer versions support higher throughput and provide better performance.

  7. Controller channels

  The controller is the processor that controls the functions of the SSD. The number of channels indicates the number of memory chips that this controller can access at the same time. As a general rule, the more channels an SSD controller has, the better the performance.

  8.Terabytes Written (TBW)

  Terabytes Written (TBW) is a measure of the lifespan of an SSD and is often covered by the manufacturer’s warranty. A higher TBW may indicate greater reliability over a longer period of time.