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The combination of Kingston and Liqid Inc was bound to produce something quite special and with the DCP1000 they have produced as, Kingston state, the fastest HHHL (Half-Height Half Length ) NVMe SSD seen to date. Aimed at the flash based data center, the drive has at its heart four NVMe SSD drives and it uses them to stunning effect. It goes without saying this is the fastest drive we have tested to date and then some. It is available in three capacities; 800GB, 1.6TB and 3.2TB.
The 1.6TB drive Kingston kindly supplied for review uses four 400GB M.2 NVMe SSDs each using a PhisonPS5007-11 8-channel controller and Toshiba 15nm MLC NAND. The drives are connected to a PLX PEX8725 24-lane PCIe Gen 3.0 switch which in turn connects to the PCB's PCIe 3.0 x8 interface. The drive is bootable and plug and play and is identified by the OS as four logical drives which can be used in a number of ways including as RAID arrays.
To say the performance is stunning is a major understatement. The official Sequential numbers for the 1.6TB drive are 6,800MB/s for reads and 6,000MB/s for writes. We even managed to better them with the ATTO benchmark, the review drive giving up a read figure of 7,011MB/s with writes at 6,511MB/s when the drives were built into a RAID 0 array.
4K Random read figures are even more impressive, with reads up to 1.1m, yep 1.1 million IOPS and writes at 200,000. With our 8K enterprise tests we couldn't reach those dizzy heights for reads, the best being 729,361 IOPS, still pretty impressive. However for writes we got a maximum of 421.412 IOPS.
The drive supports a broad spectrum of operating systems; Windows 8.1, Windows 10, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 (via updates or Hotfix driver download), Linux Kernel 3.3 and higher, FreeBSD 10.x/11, VMware vSphere 6.0 (vSphere 5.5 as download driver).
We found the 1.6TB version of the DCP1000 available to pre-order on Insight for £1461 inc vat HERE
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Pros.
- Extreme performance.
- Flexible drive setups.
Cons
- Didn't do so well in some of our tests with smaller files.
Kitguru says: Outside its natural environment the DCP1000 is a very niche drive but if you have the need to shift large sized files very, VERY quickly then it's all the drive you need.
Would it be possible to do game load times in benchmarks? Some engines, e.g. Frostbite, REDengine, RAGE, are extremely impacted by SSD/HDD performance so it’d be great to see how much of an impact such a product has on loading times.
What is the MTBF for this drive? Given the read write times. Normal day to day and say video editing on a daily basis?
“Stated endurance for the 1.6TB drive as a whole is 1820TB TBW with each of the 400GB drives rated at 375TB TBW”
Depends how much you write per day. 100GB/day would give an estimated 18200 days. 1TB/day would give an estimated 1820 days.
I’ve got a 950 Pro for close to 2 years, that’s now hit 40TB written (rated 400TBW), it’s used as a buffer drive for recordings, temp drive, and to store games on.
I’ve also got a 960 Evo, had it for about a year, is only used for OS and smaller apps like office / photoshop etc, that’s now at 6.8TB written, (rated 100TBW).
Edit: also both drives have only gone down to 99% drive life remaining according to SMART, despite having used 10% and 6.8% of their rated writes. Google the ssd endurance test, some drives almost made 2000 TBW before failing outright, and thats a few years old.
Edit edit: have a look at this;
http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/endurance-test-of-samsung-850-pro-comes-to-an-end-after-9100tb-of-writes.html
That would be interesting to see, especially with comparisons against other drives in similar raid arrays as this raid on card