INTRODUCTION

   M.2 PCIe SSDs (solid state drives) may hold the lead when it comes to performance compared to both M.2 and 2.5" SATA III models but the market still has need for the latter, especially of the 2.5" factor. This of course is due to the fact that 2.5" SSDs are far more compatible with older systems compared to M.2 drives (even more so M.2 PCIe drives) something which applies both for consumer and enterprise users. Kingston recently updated both their consumer and enterprise SSD lines with new 2.5” models one of which is the data center oriented DC450R model which is also what todays review’s all about.

   Kingston Technology Company, Inc. is the world’s largest independent manufacturer of memory products. Kingston designs, manufactures and distributes memory products for desktops, laptops, servers, printers, and Flash memory products for PDAs, mobile phones, digital cameras, and MP3 players. Through its global network of subsidiaries and affiliates, Kingston has manufacturing facilities in California, Taiwan, China and sales representatives in the United States, Europe, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, Australia, India, Taiwan, China, and Latin America.

   For their latest DC450R Data Center Enterprise line of SATA III 2.5" solid state drives (currently available in 480/960GB and 1.92/3.84TB capacities) Kingston chose to combine the PS3112-S12DC eight-channel NAND flash controller by Phison with Toshiba 64-layer BiCS3 3D TLC NAND flash and 512MB DDR4 SDRAM by Micron. The PS3112-S12DC NAND flash controller is still somewhat new and packs quite a few technologies aimed towards durability/endurance and performance such as SmartECC LDPC + RAID ECC (Phison’s LDPC 3.0 engine), end-to-end data protection (data path protection), power loss data protection (protects data from corruption and destruction in the case of unexpected power loss), cross die bad block management (prevents data from being written to bad blocks), SmartFlush (stores in-flight data on the cache for increased reliability), static and dynamic wear leveling (helps reduce premature NAND wear), S.M.A.R.T, TRIM, NCQ, AES 256-bit hardware-based encryption and support for TCG (Trusted Computing Group) Opal. Kingston covers the entire line of DC450R 2.5" SATA III SSDs with a limited 5-year warranty and reports write endurance numbers of 285TBW for the 480GB model, 582TBW for the 960GB model, 1301TBW for the 1.92TB model and 2823TBW for the 3.84TB model (all models feature an MTBF of 2 million hours).