Kingston DC400 480GB SSD Review

The DC400 comes in a blister pack with the drives capacity clearly labelled on the front while the rear has multilingual marketing and warranty notes on it.

Built on a standard 2.5in 7mm format, the DC400 has a metal enclosure held together with four Torx security screws hidden under the front label.

The front of the blue PCB holds eight 15nm MLC NAND packages (labelled Kingston FD32B08UCT1-DE) and a single 256GB DDR3L-1600 cache IC. On the rear of the board sits another eight 15nm NAND packages, the Phison PS3110-S10 controller and another 256GB cache IC.

There is a thermal pad positioned on the inside of the enclosure to dissipate heat away from the controller. Phison's PS3110 -S10  is a 32-bit, quad core, 8 channel controller built on a 55nm process. It supports SLC, MLC and TLC (it's the first Phison controller that can handle TLC) NAND.

Kingston's SSD management software utility is simply called SSD Manager (KSM). With it, you can monitor the health of the drive and how it's being used, check the drive's SMART data and update the firmware as well as securely erasing the drive.

It also allows the management of the TCG Opal and IEEE 1667 security features. You can also adjust and manage the overprovisioning of the drive by setting a Host Protected Area (HPA), but this is only supported on the DC400 series.

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