Kingston Technology Data Center DC450R 3.84TB

Editorial Type: Review Date: 2019-11-01 Views: 2,460 Tags: Storage, SSD, Data Centre, Hardware, RAID, Flash, Kingston, Data Center DC450R 3.84TB PDF Version:
The days of spinning disks in the data centre are numbered as the popularity of SSDs continues to grow exponentially

It's easy to see why as SSD capacities are increasing rapidly, making them ever more cost-effective and they offer vastly superior performance, lower power consumption and reduced cooling demands.

Kingston's family of Data Center DC450R SATA SSDs aim to make the switch even more appealing as they team up temptingly low storage costs with great performance and low latency. Available in a choice of four capacities, we reviewed Kingston's flagship 3.84TB model which has a very pleasing sub-£400 price tag.

The DC450R targets read-intensive applications such as content delivery networks, cloud services and performance-critical databases. It is solidly constructed with an impact-resistant aluminium shell which will dissipate heat far better than cheaper plastic ones.

It employs standard 3D TLC NAND technology allowing storage densities to be boosted far beyond the limits of older MLC (multi-level cell) NAND SSDs. Other important features are its SED (self-encrypting drive) capabilities and support for enterprise-level SMART monitoring.

Kingston's quoted sequential read and write speeds for the DC450R 3.84TB model are 560MB/sec and 525MB/sec respectively. Performance-wise, they are on a par with most competing SATA SSDs although this is down to the limitations of the SATA III interface which tops out at a maximum of 6Gbits/sec.

Kingston also offers a DC500R (read-intensive) and DC500M (mixed-use) family of SSDs and one significant difference from the DC450R (apart from their higher price), is they provide power loss protection (PLP) through capacitors and firmware. This matters in environments where power delivery is unreliable as it protects against data loss but in professional data centres with redundant power supplies, power backup systems and generators, this is less of an issue.

For performance testing, we called up the lab's Dell PowerEdge T640 tower server equipped with dual 22-core 2.1GHz Xeon Scalable Gold 6152 CPUs and 384GB of DDR4 memory. We use Windows Server 2019 installed on one of the server's PCIe NVMe SSDs with the remaining 16 SFF front drive bays handled by the integral Dell PERC H740P SAS3/SATA RAID controller.

We used a range of benchmarking apps and to stop the RAID controller from caching our test files, we ensured they were all significantly larger than its 4GB of embedded cache memory. Starting with one 3.84TB DC450R SSD configured as a single drive, we saw CrystalDiskMark record sequential read and write rates of 560MB/sec and 527MB/sec thus confirming Kingston's performance claims.

Throughput rates were also on the money with the app returning sequential read and write rates of 98,200 and 23,000 IOPS. Moving to Iometer, we used a 100GB test file and saw similar IOPS throughput but slightly lower read and write rates of 540MB/sec and 510MB/sec. The latter was confirmed by the ATTO Disk Benchmark software which reported very similar speeds.

It gets much more interesting when RAID arrays come into the equation and we used four SSDs to create a fault-tolerant RAID10 array on the Dell server. Iometer reported sequential read and write rates of 2,133MB/sec and 2,037MB/sec while throughput improved hugely to 275,000 and 252,000 IOPS - figures generally supported by CrystalDiskMark and ATTO.

Along with exceptional I/O rates, the DC450R delivers very low latency. During our Iometer IOPS tests on the single drive and RAID10 array, average latency never strayed beyond 2ms.

Product: 3.84TB Data Center DC450R
Supplier: Kingston Technology
Web site: www.kingston.com
Tel: +44 (0) 1932 738888
Price: 3.84TB - £373 exc VAT

Verdict: Kingston's range of data centre-class SSDs give businesses the flexibility to choose a storage solution that fits their budget and performance requirements. The Data Center DC450R delivers a high capacity at a low price and our lab tests clearly show there are no performance compromises.