Kingston DC500R 480GB Solid State Drive Review and Test

Although Kingston products are associated with many with the desktop and gaming market segment, they have something to offer for the corporate IT sector. One such offering is the DC500R and DC500M series of SSDs designed for servers. The decoding of the name is quite simple. DC means Data Center, 500 is the serial number of the line, and the letters “R” and “M” at the end determine the intended use of the disk in the server. “R” in this case means that this is a disk with a controller sharpened to speed up read operations (read-centric), and “M” is aimed at balanced use in mixed scenarios of repeated reading and writing (mixed use). In this review, we will consider a copy, or rather, even two 480 GB Kingston DC500R drives.

The Kingston DC500R line of solid state drives is made in a standard 2.5″ case format and supports SATA 3.0 (6 Gb / s) data transfer interface. In the range of the R-version, three models are currently available with a capacity of 480, 960 and 3840 GB. All products are backed by a five-year warranty and free technical support from the manufacturer. In addition, if such a drive fails during the warranty period, within the framework of the HotSwap program, which operates on the territory of Ukraine, it will be replaced with a new one within 1-2 days after contacting one of the service centers of Kingston’s official partner, ERC. Such a short period will be available to buyers from the regional centers of the country, in the case of other settlements it increases to 5 business days.

Kingston DC500R 480GB

We got engineering samples of drives, so there is no way to evaluate the quality and their packaging. The DC500R has a gray metal body. All the basic information about it is placed on a branded sticker on the front. Additionally, a round warranty seal is applied to the right, although in retail versions it may be located elsewhere.

The dimensions of the device are 70×105.5×6.8 mm, weight – 58 grams. There are standard mounting holes on the side.

On the reverse side there are through holes from the mounting screws that hold the drive assembly and mounting holes for mounting on the system case. Connectors for signal and power cables are standard.

Let’s look inside. Under the top cover, there was nothing but painting.

But the bottom cover, although not painted, has a soft thermal pad, which removes heat well from the memory controller.

The full-length PCB looks very packed with components. In addition to the standard elements for SSDs, five tantalum capacitors attract attention here, designed to help save data in the event of power surges or a sudden power outage. Six more places for them remained unsoldered and, obviously, are reserved for higher-capacity disks.

The Phison PS3112-S12DC-27 controller, manufactured using a 28-nm process technology, is responsible for the operation of the system logic. In addition to being able to use the full bandwidth of the SATA 3.0 interface, this controller supports technologies such as LDPC 3.0 ECC (error coding and correction) and ETEDP (software error protection when writing), AES-256 encryption, data loss prevention in the event of an accidental power failure. In general, this is not the fastest controller, but very, very reliable. A volatile Micron memory chip labeled 8GB459TGG is used as a buffer. Another place for such a memory is empty here.

The non-volatile flash memory is composed of eight 3D TLC circuits labeled Kingston FH64B08UCN1-41, with a capacity of 64 GB each. Each chip is supplemented with an LC138A 87K hardware decoder, three of which are located on the front of the board. And five more decoders are soldered on the reverse side.

Let’s move on to performance tests.