Kingston DC500M 3.84TB SSD Review

1. Introduction2. Kingston DC500M 3.84TB3. Testing Methodology4. CrystalDiskMark5. ATTO Disk Benchmark6. AS SSD7. Sustained Sequential Read/Write Performance8. 4KB Random Read/Write Performance9. 8KB Random Read/Write Performance10. Throughput11. Workload Scenarios12. PCMark 8 - Individual Test Suites13. Performance Stability14. Real Life File Testing15. Closing Thoughts16. View All Pages

Kingston's DC500 series has been designed to cater to the needs of data centres (hence the DC part of the product name).  The DC500R we looked at previously has been designed as a highly optimised SSD for read-centric workloads in data centres. The DC500M however, has been developed to cater for the needs of mixed-use (hence the M in the product name) workload applications in the data centre environment which require a much more balanced mix of read and write operations.

The drive implements Kingston’s QoS (Quality of Service) requirements to ensure predictable random I/O performance and low latencies over a wide range of read and write workloads.

At the heart of the DC500M is a Phison PS3112-S12DC 8-channel controller which looks after, in the case of the 3.84TB drive, 10 512GB packages of Intel 64-layer 3D TLC NAND, giving the drive a raw capacity of 5120GB.

This provides a good chunk of unused capacity free to be used for over-provisioning duties which in turn helps increase the drives endurance performance as can be seen by comparing the official endurance figures for the two 3.84TB DC500 drives. The DC500R is rated at 3504TBW compared to the whopping 9110TBW (1.3DWPD) of the DC500M.

The 3.84TB DC500M also comes with six Micron 1GB DDR4 DRAM ICs for caching duties instead of the four chips used by the R model.

The DC500M comes with proper power protection in the shape of tantalum capacitors built on the PCB and power loss protection features built into the firmware. The drive also supports AES 256-bit encryption.

Kingston quote Sequential read/write figures for the 3.84TB DC500M as up to 555MB/s and 520MB/s respectively. Using both the ATTO benchmark and our own Sequential tests we managed to squeeze a little more read/write performance from the drive, reads coming in at 561MB/s and writes at 528MB/s. Our own tests provided much the same results with reads at 561MB/s and writes of 530MB/s.

Random 4K performance for the drive is quoted as up to 98,000 IOPS for reads and up to 75,000 IOPS for writes with the drive-in steady-state. We could confirm that read figure as the drive produced a peak score of 98,923.7 IOPS when tested. Random write performance is quoted as up to 75,000 IOPS. However, the review drive produced a peak figure way past this when tested using 4 threads and an 8GB span at 88,860.9 IOPS.

The ability via the SSD Manager software utility to manually adjust the Over Positioning segment, above the factory default (approx. 32% for the 3.84TB DC500M) allows data centre managers to better tune the drive depending on what workload or application that it’s being used with, giving the drive more flexibility as to which environments it can be used in.

We found the 3.84TB Kingston DC500M on Span.com for £787.29 (inc VAT) HERE.

Pros

• Overall performance.
• Stunning endurance.
• Large capacity.

Cons

• Drive suffered from high latencies when under some loads during our testing.

Kitguru says: Like Kingston's DC500R, the DC500M offers the large capacities, hardware power protection and end to end data protection that data centre IT managers demand of this class of drive but adds much, much more impressive endurance ratings to the mix.

 

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