Kingston DC1000B 480GB SSD Review

Rating: 8.0.

The latest drive to be added to Kingston's range of data centre drives is the DC1000B, an NVMe drive aimed at a very small but rapidly growing market segment of boot drives for servers. Built around a Phison controller and 64-layer 3D TLC NAND, the DC1000B also features on-board power loss protection.

The read centric DC1000B product line consists of just two models, a 240GB drive and the 480GB unit we are reviewing here. At the heart of the drive is a second-generation Phison PCIe Gen3 x4 NVMe controller, the PS5012-E12, which looks after 64-layer 3D TLC NAND.

The PS5012-E12 is Phison’s second-generation PCIe Gen3 x4 NVMe controller. The 8-channel controller is built on a TSMC 28nm process and has been designed to work with TLC and QLC NAND technologies with support for Phison’s SmartECC and the latest LDPC (Low-Density Parity Check) error correction as well as AES256, TCG OPAL and TCG Pyrite hardware encryption support. With 8 NAND channels and 32 NAND chip enable lines, the maximum amount of NAND the controller can support is 8TB.

Kingston quotes Sequential performance for the 480GB drive as up to 3,200MB/s for reads and up to 565MB/s for writes. The 240GB makes do with up to 2,200MB/s for reads and 290MB/s for writes.

4K random performance for the 480GB drive is quoted as up to 205,000 IOPS for reads and up to 20,000 IOPS for writes. The 240GB drive is rated as up to 111,000 IOPS and 12,000 IOPS for reads and writes respectively.

Power consumption wise, the 480GB drive is rated as 1.90W idle, 1.90W and 1.74W for average read and writes respectively. Maximum consumption is listed as 4.88W for reads and 1.81W for writes.

As the drive is a fully-fledged data centre/enterprise drive it comes with PLP (Power Loss Protection) hardware installed on the drive and it supports SED (Self-Encrypting Drive) via AES 256-bit encryption.

Endurance wise, the 480GB is rated as 475TBW or around 0.5 DWPD for the length of the 5-year warranty Kingston backs the drive with.

Physical Specifications:
Usable Capacities: 480GB.
NAND Components: 64-layer 3D TLC NAND.
NAND Controller: Phison PS5012-E12.
Cache: 1TB.
Interface: PCIe NVMe Gen3 x4.
Form Factor: M.2 2280.
Dimensions: 80 x 22 x 3.8mm.
Drive Weight: 9g.

Firmware Version: ECEK22.3

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