In Use:

The SSD upgrade kit really makes installation a breeze, whether you have a desktop or laptop computer. For testing purposes the UV500 drive was simply installed in to an available 2.5" bay in a small form factor PC and connected to a SATA-600 capable header on the motherboard. The drive was available upon the next boot in to Windows 10, and the screenshot below shows what CrystalDiskInfo had to say about the drive.



Kingston now offers a piece of software called SSD Manager which can provide technical information on your Kingston brand SSD. In the three shots below we see info on the UV500 drive, as well as the Kingston HyperX Savage 960GB SSD which serves as the boot drive of the system. From these we see that the drive is reported to be in good health, there are no firmware updates available (although the Savage drive does have a firmware update available), and we see some details on the drive security. This indicates that TCG Opal is disabled, which is software that can be applied to your system, but that is not part of the base AES 256-bit hardware encryption. As installed right now, without a TCG Opal 2.0 package (like WinMagic, McAfee or Wave) installed, your data is not secured. So, yes you have paid extra for a solid state drive with full-disk encryption, but now you may need to pay some more to install a software package that can take advantage of it. For corporate users that insist on securing their devices/data these steps may be critical, but for the typical consumer this type of protection and additional expense might not be a key consideration when buying an SSD.



The 960GB version of the UV500 2.5" drive is rated for read/write speeds of up to 520/500MB/s. Through the use of CrystalDiskMark and AS SSD, we will see how fast the drive really is, and how it compares to the other high end 960GB drive installed in the same system.

The screenshot below shows the CrystalDiskMark results for the UV500 drive run in the default configuration...



The next screenshot shows the results while runnin the 0 fill configuration...



What we see is that the drive is easily able to surpass 520MB/s read and 500MB/s write according to this benchmark.