Kingston DC400 480GB SSD Review

Rating: 8.0.

Kingston's DC400 series are the latest additions to the companies Enterprise range of SSDs and have been designed as entry level drives for data centers. The new drives have been built with read-intensive applications in mind for use in a mixed workload environments.

The DC400 treads down a well-worn path with its combination of 15nm MLC NAND and the quad core Phison S10 controller. It has the sort of protection built in that you expect for a drive in this environment; end-to-end data path protection, SmartRefresh and SmartECC as well as firmware controlled power loss management.

At the time of writing, there are just two off the shelf models; 480GB and 960GB, but early in 2017 there should be a 1.6TB capacity drive joining them. However, there are more optimised versions of the DC400 available by special order only. These are two Performance Optimised drives (400GB & 800GB) and a single Read Optimised version (1.8TB).

Kingston quote Sequential read/write figures for the 480GB at 555MB/s and 535MB/s respectively with maximum 4K random performance listed as 99,000 IOPS for reads and 90,000 IOPS for writes dropping to 85,000 IOPS read and 11,000 IOPS writes when the drive is in steady state. To give an idea of how special the optimised drives are, the 400GB drive has the same out of the box IOPS write performance as the 480GB drive – 90,000 IOPS but when in steady state the performance drops to 35,000 IOPS not the 11,000 of the standard 480GB drive.

The endurance of the 480GB DC400 is quoted as 257TBW (0.30 DWPD) and Kingston back the drive with a 5-year warranty

Physical Specifications:
Usable Capacities:
NAND Components: 15nm MLC
Interface: Serial ATA (SATA) 6Gb/s (SATA III)
Form Factor: 2.5in, 7mm
NAND Controller: Phison S10
Dimensions: 69.9 x 100 x 7 mm
Drive Weight: 92.34g

Firmware Version: SAFM02.G

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