KingFast E-Drive Pro KF2510SCF 120GB SLC SSD Review – Blistering SLC Performance At The Enterprise Level

If you are a novice regarding SSDs and SSD technology, the names 'Runcore' and 'KingFast' should at least strike a chord. The two companies recently merged, with KingFast becoming the sub-brand of RunCore; neither have shown signs of slowing down. Being two of the top SSD manufacturers, we will be looking at their newest SLC creation. Between the three NAND memory types - SLC (Single Layer Cell), MLC (Multi Layer Cell), and TLC (Three Layer Cell) - consumers typically are accustomed to MLC. SLC has the best endurance and best performance, but is also more expensive and lower in capacity due to cost and technical limitations. TLC is the exact opposite, and hence is not seen due to its lack of productivity, especially since MLC fits as the best intermediate between the two - solid performance, high density, low cost, decent endurance. While the new KingFast E-Drive Pro KF2510SCF 120GB SLC SSD we are reviewing is priced at roughly $280 for a fairly low capacity, it is anything but disappointing. As we shall see, it lives up to all of the features that SLC brings, especially the exceptional performance. SPECIFICATIONS AND PACKAGING Again due to technical limitations, we see the KingFast E-Drive Pro KF2510SCF 120GB SLC SSD offered in low capacities of 60GB and 120GB. Regardless of the model, both sport blazing speeds 556MB/s read and 530MB/s write. 12000T endurance is also quite impressive, alongside high IOPS numbers. Followed by a three-year warranty, it is certainly meant to be used in an enterprise setting. Moreover, the BCH ECC 55-bits/512-bytes, sudden power-off recovery, static and dynamic wear-leveling, and RAISE functionalities are present for extended user data protection, as well as extra endurance. Moving onto the packaging, the front of the KingFast E-Drive Pro KF2510SCF 120GB SLC SSD has a great layout of quick features, while the back is relatively plain. Regardless, the box does have a pleasing colour palette and is quite easy on the eyes: Inside we have another frame that holds the SSD: It also holds extra contents, including a standard SATA cable, 2.5" to 3.5" bracket mount, mounting screws, warranty card, and product date checker which is a unique addition. SSD EXTERIOR AND CLOSER LOOK The KingFast E-Drive Pro KF2510SCF 120GB SLC 2.5" SSD finally makes its appearance. The top of the unit has a sticker that basically has the same information and colour scheme as present on the box: The back is completely barren, showing off the nice shiny silver aluminum frame. Note that the edges are clean and rounded, and that the four screws make it extremely easy to open. The versatility of mounting is evident as we have four holes by each screw as seen here, as well as four additional mounting holes on the sides (two on each side) for the 3.5" adapter mount: Opening the enclosure reveals the sea-blue PCB, a refreshing change from the usual green. Take a look at the excellent build quality; flawless in spacing of components and overall reliability. Note that since there are no data-based capacitors or DRAM cache buffer, there is no need for extra thermals pads or layers. Zooming into the PCB, the reason for the previous statement is due to the popular SandForce SF-2281 SSD controller, which sits very close to the SATA pins, reducing performance latency. Alongside built-in thermal protection, the controller supports NCQ, TRIM, SATA 3.0 interface, and AES-128 data encryption just to name a few features: Continuing, the second-generation SF-2200 Flash Storage Processors (FSPs) use LSI technologies such as DuraWrite, higher-level BCH ECC algorithm as mentioned previously (with up to 55 bits/512 Byte sector protection), and the unique LSI RAISE (Redundant Array of Independent Silicon Elements) technology; RAISE provides the protection and reliability of RAID on a single drive without the 2x write overhead of parity. All of these come together to provide a cooler, faster, more efficient and durable SSD, perfect for an enterprise environment. Furthermore, we have the eight 25nm process Intel 29F16B16NCNE1 Single-Level Cell (SLC) NAND flash chips that are ONFI 2.2 compliant with 152-Ball BGA packaging, are synchronous in design, and with dual x8 device bus width. Intel’s most high end SLC flash memory, each module is 16GB each for a combined 128GB (8GB reserved for SandForce firmware). The packages are rated at 100,000 program/erase cycles, 33x more than most 2xnm consumer/commercial grade flash, with temperatures of up to 100 degrees Celsius; if you were worried about the lack of thermal cooling, that should put yours fears to rest! The back of the PCB has nothing of note as all of the NAND packages are on the front. If the KingFast E-Drive Pro KF2510SCF 120GB SLC SSD was to get higher capacities, we would probably see the extended chips here; note that if there were a DRAM cache buffer present, it would also most likely be housed here. All-in-all the picture is clear: the KingFast E-Drive Pro KF2510SCF 120GB SLC SSD is meant for always-on enterprise applications - clearly illustrated by the high quality components. A trusted controller in the SF-2281, alongside Intel reliable SLC 29F16B16NCNE1 NAND chips equates to a solidly optimized and efficient SSD capable of handling the most aggressive procedures, while providing state-of-the-industry data protection. TESTING METHODOLOGY AND BENCHMARKS The system configuration for testing the KingFast E-Drive Pro KF2510SCF 120GB SLC SSD will be Intel-based: The benchmark suites used for testing will most likely already be on your system, as essentially all of this software is available online. As such, it allows direct correlation between reader and reviewer due to the ease of accessibility, and hence results can simply be compared between different test systems and configurations. Real-world benchmarks included a batch of files and folders with capacities of 250MB, 500MB, and 1000MB respectively to test file transfer performance. Windows 7 boot times were also monitored and timed starting from the OS load screen to Steam’s login window (the last program to load). For consistency, each test was run three times for the DRAM cache to kick in, utilizing AHCI as the storage mode. The average of all three was taken as the final result. Note that once installed, the total size shows up as roughly 112GB: CRYSTALDISKINFO X64 VER. 5.5.0 CrystalDiskInfo allows monitoring the health of all the physical hard disks, may they be internal, or external. Using their own built-in SMART tools plus any temperature-monitoring tools that may be present in the computer or hard drive, CDI gives accurate health readings of your drives and gives warnings in case of imminent drive malfunction. Everything seems to be running well, including the commands and features, with only AAM greyed-out. Temperatures are also cooler than the rest of the system, so the cooling is definitely adequate. ATTO DISK BENCHMARK VER. 2.47 The ATTO Disk Benchmark measures storage performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. ATTO is rated to test RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives. Speeds are pretty darn close to the advertised speeds of 556MB/s read and 530MB/s write. CRYSTALDISKMARK X64 VER. 3.0.2f CrystalDiskMark is a disk benchmark utility that measures performance for sequential and random reads/writes of various sizes for any storage device. It is useful for comparing the speed of both portable and local storage devices. The numbers are staggering for each of the tests, especially the 4K speeds. With three different runs in CDM, both 0-fill and 1-fill benchmarks, alongside random access numbers revealed nearly identical results. Random access was actually fast by far in essentially all areas compared to the other two, which certainly speaks highly of the KingFast E-Drive Pro KF2510SCF 120GB SLC SSD and its components. AS-SSD VER. 1.7.4739.38088 AS-SSD Benchmark is a lightweight application that is designed to provide a simple means of evaluating the performance of SSDs. The tool contains six synthetic and three copy tests. The synthetic tests to determine the sequential and random read and write performance of the SSD. These tests are carried out without use of the operating system caches.The program comes with a copy benchmark as well as one for compression and it can also be used with hard disk drives. AS-SSD due to its loathed incompressible data benchmark is by far the most taxing and most dreaded. The tests were absolutely no issue for the KingFast E-Drive Pro KF2510SCF 120GB SLC SSD, which produced one of, if not THE highest results ever on a SATA 3.0 SSD. These are some absolutely astounding results, especially for a benchmarking program known for its grueling tests. Even the advertised access times were at or below 0.1ms. ANVIL STORAGE UTILITIES VER. 1.0.51 RC6 Anvil Storage Utilities is a powerful tool that is designed in to provide a simple means of assessing the read and write performance of a solid state drive. The hardest act to perform on Anvil is balance, and again, the KingFast E-Drive Pro KF2510SCF 120GB SLC SSD outperformed the competition, even in the incompressible tests - the scores are just barely 100 points apart! HD TUNE PRO VER. 5.00 HD Tune Pro supports performing secure erasure, running comprehensive error scans (including a review of a disk’s SMART health status), displaying read, write, and spin-up times and recording benchmark performance metrics. As an added bonus we have the HD Tune Pro run a plethora of benchmarks and extra tests. We also see higher reads and writes here, and since ATTO tends to do the same, the results are confirmed for both benchmarking tools. The file transfer speed is the fastest we have seen at nearly 392MB/s. REAL-WORLD BENCHMARKS Moving on to the real-world tests, we see that the SandForce SF-2281 FSP is more than capable of boosting overall productivity. The file copy results are pretty quick for duplicating and moving around data: Again, absolutely staggering results on a clean system. What is scary that the speeds could be even faster if tests were done on Windows 8 (although a tad skewed), and if Steam was not network dependent! FINAL WORDS AND CONCLUSION The KingFast E-Drive Pro KF2510SCF 120GB SLC SSD is an absolute beast of an SSD. There really is no denying that, especially considering it absolutely crushed the benchmarks, including the vaunted AS-SSD behemoth; mind you, using top-grade Intel 29F16B16NCNE1 SLC NAND flash chips and LSI's SandForce SF-2281 certainly helps a ton in that regard. Not only did the SSD breeze through compressible data - but even incompressible was not an issue for it. It is the first time we have seen an SSD perform astonishingly well in every test and benchmark tool we threw at it. Price at around $280, it is a little tough to swallow considering you can get more than double the space going with MLC-based SSDs. To be fair however, the KingFast E-Drive Pro 120GB does come with added goodies - 3.5" adapter and SATA cable - as well as a three-year warranty, although we would have preferred the industry standard of five years. This is also SLC we are talking about, and we can expect the slight bump in price. Overall we are thoroughly pleased with the KingFast E-Drive Pro KF2510SCF 120GB SLC SSD and certainly recommend the premium for a quality solid-state drive of this calibre. While it is meant for industrial and enterprise environments, there is no question it is worth the investment with top-notch internals, especially so for those utilizing servers as it would make an exceptional OS/caching drive paired with an LSI RAID controller. The sheer all-round raw performance, efficiency, endurance, and robustness are phenomenal in every aspect, and too difficult to not simply drool over! The KingFast E-Drive Pro KF2510SCF 120GB SLC SSD can be purchased at www.kingfast-ssd.com for the listed price of $279.00 USD.

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KingFast E-Drive Pro KF2510SCF 120GB SLC SSD Review – Blistering SLC Performance At The Enterprise Level

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