Kingston DC500R 3.84TB SSD Review

1. Introduction2. Review Model3. Testing Methodology4. CrystalMark v6.05. ATTO Disk Benchmark6. ASSSD7. 128KB Sequential Read/Writes8. 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 DC500R, (the DC stands for Data Centre) has been designed as a highly optimised SSD for read-centric workloads in data centres. 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 DC500R is a Phison PS3112-S12DC 8-channel controller which looks after, in the case of the 3.84TB drive, 16 256GB packages of Intel 64-layer 3D TLC NAND. The 3.84TB drive also comes with four Micron 1GB DDR4 DRAM ICs for caching duties.

Kingston quote Sequential read/write figures for the 3.84TB DC500R 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 530MB/s with ATTO. Our own tests provided much the same results with reads at 561.21MB/s and writes of 529.79MB/s.

Random 4K performance for the drive is quoted as 98,000 IOPS for reads and 28,000 IOPS for writes with the drive-in steady-state. We could confirm that read figure as the drive produced a peak score of 99,139 IOPS when tested. When we tested random writes with our usual 4 threads, 8GB span test we got a result of 90,044 IOPS, far, far exceeding the official number.

However, when we re-tested the drive across the whole capacity with a single thread at a QD of 1 the resulting score of 34,571 IOPS was a lot closer to that official figure.

The ability via the SSD Manager utility to manually adjust the Over Positioning segment, above the factory default (approx 7%) allows data centre managers to better tune the drive depending on what workload or application that it’s being used with. This ability gives the drive more flexibility as to which environments it can be used in.

The DC500R 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.

We found the 3.84TB Kingston DC500R on Span.com for £672 (inc VAT) HERE.

Pros

• Overall Performance.
• Endurance.

Cons

• Drive suffers from high latencies when under some loads.

Kitguru says: Kingston's DC500R offers large capacities, hardware power protection and end to end data protection together with the enterprise-grade performance stability IT managers demand of this class of drive.

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