Kingston DC450R 3.84TB SSD Review

Kingston’s DC450R, (where the DC stands for Data Centre) has been designed as a highly optimised SSD for read-centric (hence the ‘R' in the name) workloads in data centres such as Edge computing, High-speed databases, SQL server reporting services (SSRS) and Content Delivery Networks (CDN). 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. The drive also supports AES 256-bit encryption.

At the heart of the DC450R is a Phison PS3112-S12DC 8-channel controller which looks after, in the case of the 3.84TB drive, 16 256GB packages of 3D TLC NAND. The 3.84TB drive also comes with four Micron 1GB DDR4 DRAM ICs for caching duties.

Kingston quotes Sequential read/write figures for the 3.84TB DC450R as up to 560MB/s and 525MB/s respectively. We couldn't quite hit those maximum figures when the review drive was tested with the ATTO benchmark, recording 535MB/s read and 505MB/s writes. However, when we switched to our own Sequential tests we could indeed confirm those maximums with the drive producing figures of 562MB/s and 529MB/s for reads and writes respectively.

Random 4K performance for the drive is quoted as 99,000 IOPS for reads and 26,000 IOPS for writes. With our 4-threaded read tests we managed to squeeze a wee bit more out of the drive at 99,733 IOPS. When we tested random writes with our usual 4 threads, 8GB span test we got a result of 88,309 IOPS (QD64), far, far exceeding the official 26,000 IOPS. However, when we re-tested the drive across the whole capacity with a single thread at a QD of 1 the resulting score of 35,391 IOPS (144.97MB/s) 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.

Although it's aimed at the data centre environment, the DC450R doesn't have power loss protection capacitors although the mounts for them are on the PCB. Power consumption for the 3.84TB DC450R is stated as 1.48W for Max/Avr reads, 3.93W for average writes and 5.5W for maximum writes with an idle figure of 1.3W.

Endurance wise the TBW figure for the drive is 2823TB which works out at 0.4 DWPD over the length of the 5-year warranty Kingston backs the drive with.

We found the 3.84TB version of the DC450R on Span.com for £436.80 (inc VAT) HERE.

Discuss on our Facebook page HERE.

Pros

• Performance stability.
• Overall performance.
• Endurance.

Cons

• Lack of hardware power protection.
• High latencies when under some test loads.

KitGuru says: Kingston’s DC450R joins the company's stable of enterprise SSD drives offering a wide range of capacities, good overall performance, and the enterprise-grade performance stability IT managers demand from this class of drive.

Become a Patron!

Be sure to check out our sponsors store EKWB here