Kingston has decided to go for the minimalist approach with packaging on the KC2500, which is a great idea since this can be easily recycled once the drive is removed. As you can see there is very little by way of information, aside from some stats surrounding the speed, capacity and warranty. To extract the drive from the packet, we just need to slice the back. The drive comes on its own with a plastic container.


KC2500 conforms to the M.2 form factor and more specifically the 2280 size. Kingston has gone with a simple aesthetic on this SSD the specifications label will obviously be the most visible element if you don’t have a motherboard heatsink clamped to the top of the drive. While it isn’t garish, it still draws attention which may be a good or bad thing. Along with the drive, users are treated to a license of Acronis True Image HD – the key is on the reverse.


This particular M.2 drive is based on the SMI 2262EN NVMe controller which offers eight-channels and against the rival Phison E12 controller it offers lower IOPS at up to 420K but excels in sequential read/write performance – reaching 3500MB/s.

Over the next pages we’ll be putting the KC2500 under examination to see what you can expect in terms of performance.