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The DC500M has been designed to meet the needs of mixed-use workload applications in data centres where the demand requires a balanced mix of read and write operations rather than the read centric workloads the R version of the DC500 has been designed to handle.
Kingston's DC500M comes in four capacity options; 480GB, 960GB, 1.92TB and the 3.84TB flagship drive we are looking at here. At the heart of the DC500M is a Phison PS3112-S12DC 8-channel controller which looks after Intel 64-layer 3D TLC NAND.
Kingston quoted Sequential read/write performance across the range as is up to 555MB/s and 520MB/s respectively. Random 4K read performance is quoted as up to 98,000 IOPS for all four drives with write speeds for the four drives quoted as up to 58,000 IOPS for the 480GB drive, 70,000 IOPS for the 960GB drive and up to 75,000 IOPS for both the 1.92TB and 3.84TB drives.
Official power ratings for the drive are 1.56W idle, 1.8W for maximum reads and 4.86W for maximum writes. The endurance of the 3.84TB DC500M is quoted as 9110TBW (1.3 DWPD) and Kingston back the drive with a 5-year warranty.
Physical Specifications:
Usable Capacities: 3.84TB.
NAND Components: Intel 64-Layer 3D TLC NAND.
NAND Controller: Phison S12DC 8-channel.
Cache: Micron DDR4-2666.
Interface: Serial ATA (SATA) 6Gb/s (SATA III).
Form Factor: 2.5in, 7mm.
Dimensions: 69.9 x 100 x 7mm.
Drive Weight: 92.34g.
Firmware Version: SCEKJ2.3
As with the DC500R, the DC500M ships in a blister pack with the drive's capacity clearly labelled on the front while the rear has multilingual marketing and warranty notes on it.
The DC500M is built on a standard 2.5in, 7mm format using a metal enclosure, held together with four Torx security screws hidden under the front label.
Although the 3.84TB DC500M uses the same Kingston branded Intel 64-layer 3D TLC NAND memory as the 3.84TB DC500R, there is a difference in the NAND packages used and the layout of the components on the PCB. Where the DC500R uses 16 256GB packages, the DC500M uses 10 packages of 512GB to give a raw capacity of 5120GB.
The unused space is used for over-provisioning purposes to greatly enhance the endurance of the drive. The difference this makes can be seen by comparing the endurance figures for the two 3.84TB drives. The DC500R is rated at 3504TBW (0.5DWPD) while the DC500M is rated at a very impressive 9110TBW (1.3DWPD).
The NAND packages are equally split between the two sides of the PCB. On one side of the PCB, the NAND chips are joined by three Micron DDR4-2666 DRAM chips. On the other side of the board are three more DRAM chips and the Phison PS3112-S12DC controller. The DC500M has two more DRAM ICs than the DC500R but fewer tantalum capacitors for power loss protection.
Built on a 28nm process, the eight-channel PS3112-S12DC is Phison's latest SATA III controllers supporting drives up to 8TB. It features Phison’s 3rd generation LDPC ECC engine and supports AES 256 bit encryption.
Kingston’s SSD management software utility is simply called SSD Manager. 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. You can also adjust and manage the over-provisioning of the drive.
For testing, the drives are all wiped and reset to factory settings by HDDerase V4. We try to use free or easily available programs and some real world testing so you can compare our findings against your own system.
This is a good way to measure potential upgrade benefits.
Main system:
Intel Core i7-7700K with 16GB of DDR4-3200 RAM, Sapphire R9 390 Nitro and an Asus Prime Z270-A motherboard.
Other Drives
Crucial BX100 1TB
Crucial BX200 960GB
Crucial M550 1TB
Crucial MX200 1TB
Crucial MX300 2TB
Crucial MX300 Limited Edition 750GB
Integral SVR-PRO 100 4TB
Kingson DC500R
Kingston SSDNow V310 960GB
Kingston UV500 960GB
Samsung 840 EVO 1TB
Samsung 850 EVO 1TB
Samsung 860 EVO 4TB
Samsung 860 QVO 4TB
Samsung 860 PRO 4TB
SK hynix SE3010 960GB
Toshiba TR200 960GB
Ultima Pro X 960GB
Software:
Atto Disk Benchmark 3.5.
IOMeter.
Futuremark PC Mark 8
All our results were achieved by running each test five times with every configuration this ensures that any glitches are removed from the results. Trim is confirmed as running by typing fsutil behaviour query disabledeletenotify into the command line. A response of disabledeletenotify =0 confirms TRIM is active.
CrystalDiskMark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using v6.0.
The DC500M has slightly better write performance than the DC500R in the CrystalDiskMark test at a QD of 32. Comparing the two benchmark results it appears that the Phison PS3112-S12DC seems to prefer compressible data when reading 4K data at a QD of 1.
The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously.
Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.
Kingston's quoted Sequential read/write performance for the DC500M as up to 555MB/s and 520MB/s respectively, figures we could confirm with the ATTO benchmark.
AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read and write tests, as well as random read and write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive. AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures.
The DC500M was a wee bit faster than the DC500R for both reads and writes in the ASSSD benchmark with a read score of 476 and writes at 529.
Officially the Sequential read/write performance for the 3.84TB DC500M is up to 555MB/s and 520MB/s respectively. We managed to squeeze a little more out of the drive with our Sequential tests with 561MB/s for reads and 530MB/s for writes.
4KB Random Read Performance
The official 4K random read IOPS rating for the 3.84TB DC500M is up to 98,000 IOPS a figure that we could confirm with our 4K random read test, the drive peaking at 98,923.7 IOPS at a QD of 32. After the initial burst, it remained very consistent across the tested queue depths, which is what you need from a drive aimed at the data centre environment.
4KB Random Write Performance
The official 4K random write performance for the drive is up to 75,000 IOPS. However, with our 4 threads, 8GB span write test, the drive sailed past this figure, peaking at 88,860.9 IOPS at a QD of 16. Unlike the random read performance, the drive is very consistent from the start of our tests.
8KB Random Read Performance
A high degree of data centre work is done with 8K data so we tested the drive at this data level (8 threads, 16GB span) to see how it would perform. The read performance peaks at 59,098.8 IOPS (484.14MB/s) at a QD of 128. Once again after the initial burst, it remained very consistent across the tested queue depth, the only downside is the high latency while achieving it.
8KB Random Write Performance
In the 8K random write test, the drive peaked at 54,197.5 IOPS (443.99MB/s) again at a QD of 128. But as with the 8K random read results, the latency figures are very high.
In our throughput tests we couldn't quite hit the maximum figures quoted by Kingston of 555MB/s for reads and 520MB for writes with the tested drive read performance peaking at 518.94MB/s with writes peaking at 500.48MB/s
We also tested the drive in a number of workload scenarios that it might face in real life. The IOMeter settings we used to test with are listed below:-
Database 8K 8Threads QD64
Transfer Size: 8K Reads: 67% Writes: 33% Random: 100%
Boundary: 4K Outstanding IO: 64 Threads/Workers: 8
Decision Support DB
Transfer Size: 1MB Reads: 100% Writes: 0% Random: 100%
Boundary: 4K Outstanding IO: 64 Threads/Workers: 8
Digital Video Surveillance
Transfer Size: 512K Reads: 90% Writes: 10% Sequential: 100%
Boundary: 512K Outstanding IO: 64 Threads/Workers:8
Exchange Server 2007
Transfer Size: 8K Reads: 67% Writes: 33% Random: 100%
Boundary: 8K Outstanding IO: 60 Threads/Workers: 1
Mail Server
Transfer Size: 32K Reads: 58% Writes: 42% Random: 95%
Boundary: 4K Outstanding IO: 64 Threads/Workers: 8
Microsoft VM
Transfer Size: 4K Reads: 100% Writes: 0% Random: 80%
Boundary: 2K Outstanding IO: 64 Threads/Workers: 1
OS Paging
Transfer Size: 64K Reads: 90% Writes: 10% Sequential: 100%
Boundary: 4K Outstanding IO: 64 Threads/Workers:1
Video On Demand
Transfer Size: 128K Reads: 100% Writes: 0% Random: 100%
Boundary: 4K Outstanding IO: 512 Threads/Workers: 8
Web File Server 64KB
Transfer Size: 64K Reads: 95% Writes: 5% Random: 75%
Boundary: 4K Outstanding IO: 64 Threads/Workers: 8
Web File Server 8KB
Transfer Size: 8K Reads: 95% Writes: 5% Random: 75%
Boundary: 4K Outstanding IO: 64 Threads/Workers: 8
Web File Server 4KB
Transfer Size: 4K Reads: 95% Writes: 5% Random: 75%
Boundary: 4K Outstanding IO: 64 Threads/Workers: 8
Workstation
Transfer Size: 8K Reads: 80% Writes: 20% Random: 80%
Boundary: 8K Outstanding IO: 64 Threads/Workers: 4
VDI Light
Transfer Size:10K Reads: 15% Writes: 85% Random: 100%
Boundary: 2K Outstanding IO: 4 Threads/Workers: 1
VDI Medium
Transfer Size:10K Reads: 15% Writes: 85% Random: 100%
Boundary: 2K Outstanding IO: 8 Threads/Workers: 1
VDI Heavy
Transfer Size:10K Reads: 15% Writes: 85% Random: 100%
Boundary: 2K Outstanding IO:12 Threads/Workers: 1
The DC500M handled our workload scenarios without any problems. The fastest performance came from the Decision Support DB test at 561.12MB/s.
Futuremark’s PCMark 8 Standard Storage test saves a large amount of performance data. The default test runs through the test suite of 10 applications three times. Here we show the total bandwidth performance for each of the individual test suites for the third and final benchmark run.
The DC500M handles PCMark 08's Standard Storage test very well with pretty strong performance throughout. The best performance came from the Adobe Photoshop Heavy test trace at 491.8MB/s
For the long term performance stability test, we set the drive up to run a 20-minute 4K random test with a 30% write, 70% read split, at a Queue Depth of 256 over the entire disk. The 3.84TB DC500M averaged 87,255 IOPS for the test with an excellent performance stability of 96%, a figure you should be expecting from a drive aimed at data centre usage.
To test real life performance of a drive we use a mix of folder/file types and by using the FastCopy utility (which gives a time as well as MB/s result) we record the performance of drive reading from & writing to a 256GB Samsung SSD850 PRO.
100GB data file.
60GB iso image.
50GB File folder – 28,523 files.
21GB 8K Movie demos.
11GB 4K Raw Movie Clips (8 MP4V files).
4.25GB 3D Printer File Folder (mostly .STL).
1GB AutoCAD File Folder (.dwg and .dxf).
Our real-life file transfer tests posed little problem for the DC500M as it handled most of them very efficiently. As always it's the small files that make up the 50GB file folder transfer that produces the slowest performance.
Kingston's DC500 series has been designed to cater to the needs of data centres (hence the DC part of the product name). The DC500R we looked at previously has been designed as a highly optimised SSD for read-centric workloads in data centres. The DC500M however, has been developed to cater for the needs of mixed-use (hence the M in the product name) workload applications in the data centre environment which require a much more balanced mix of read and write operations.
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 DC500M is a Phison PS3112-S12DC 8-channel controller which looks after, in the case of the 3.84TB drive, 10 512GB packages of Intel 64-layer 3D TLC NAND, giving the drive a raw capacity of 5120GB.
This provides a good chunk of unused capacity free to be used for over-provisioning duties which in turn helps increase the drives endurance performance as can be seen by comparing the official endurance figures for the two 3.84TB DC500 drives. The DC500R is rated at 3504TBW compared to the whopping 9110TBW (1.3DWPD) of the DC500M.
The 3.84TB DC500M also comes with six Micron 1GB DDR4 DRAM ICs for caching duties instead of the four chips used by the R model.
The DC500M 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.
Kingston quote Sequential read/write figures for the 3.84TB DC500M 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 528MB/s. Our own tests provided much the same results with reads at 561MB/s and writes of 530MB/s.
Random 4K performance for the drive is quoted as up to 98,000 IOPS for reads and up to 75,000 IOPS for writes with the drive-in steady-state. We could confirm that read figure as the drive produced a peak score of 98,923.7 IOPS when tested. Random write performance is quoted as up to 75,000 IOPS. However, the review drive produced a peak figure way past this when tested using 4 threads and an 8GB span at 88,860.9 IOPS.
The ability via the SSD Manager software utility to manually adjust the Over Positioning segment, above the factory default (approx. 32% for the 3.84TB DC500M) allows data centre managers to better tune the drive depending on what workload or application that it’s being used with, giving the drive more flexibility as to which environments it can be used in.
We found the 3.84TB Kingston DC500M on Span.com for £787.29 (inc VAT) HERE.
Pros
- Overall performance.
- Stunning endurance.
- Large capacity.
Cons
- Drive suffered from high latencies when under some loads during our testing.
Kitguru says: Like Kingston's DC500R, the DC500M offers the large capacities, hardware power protection and end to end data protection that data centre IT managers demand of this class of drive but adds much, much more impressive endurance ratings to the mix.
