Kingston DC500R 3.84TB SSD Review

The DC500R 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 DC500R 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.

Both sides of the PCB are crammed with components. There is a thermal pad between the case and the controller to help dissipate heat from the controller through the enclosure. The only time the drive felt really warm in use was when it was being pushed hard during benchmarking runs.

 
On one side of the PCB sit eight 256GB packages of Kingston branded Intel 64-layer 3D TLC NAND along with a pair of Micron DDR4-2666 DRAM chips. Also on side of the PCB are a row of tantalum capacitors for power loss protection. The other side of the board has yet more tantalum caps, eight further NAND packages, a couple more cache IC's and the Phison PS3112-S12DC controller.

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

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