Kingston DC500R 960GB Data Centre SSD Review

Pricing and Final Thoughts

When you want truly reliable drives even when they’re used to the max, then you need to pay a little more than for a consumer drive. Still, at £196.33 for the 960GB version, the Kingston DC500R isn’t expensive. US readers can find it for $257.87 on Amazon at the time of this review.

Final Thoughts

I think that this review was very enlightening for people who thought that read-optimised drives can’t write. The Kingston DC500R proves that this isn’t the case as it did very well at write operations too. It just isn’t as durable when there are a lot of writes as drives built for such operations. It also proves again that it’s important to pick the right drive for the task at hand.

The Kingston DC500R delivers a very reliable performance on which you can count – throughout the entire drive. It performs straight out and continues to do so instead of bringing a short burst performance. Whether there’s a lot of load on your system or not, the drive output performance will be the same. That’s what you want in a data centre drive and it’s what you get from the DC500 series.

Feature-wise, the DC500R also has everything you’ll want. Power loss protection, end-to-end data protection, and so forth.

Should I Purchase One?

Now, a few gamers out there might utter the phrase: “My NVMe drive is four times as fast”. Well, yes and no. It has a burst speed which is that fast, but it will quickly drop to around 1200MB/s once the cache is used. Two of these already compete with that and in a far more stable setup. The DC500 series also comes in a standard form factor which you can plug in and out of your servers in big amounts. On top of that comes the 4TB capacity options, onboard power loss protection, and a drive which was designed for continues use. There is no doubt, I would be proud to have these drives in my servers.

Where Should I Use Such a Drive?

There is no 100% correct answer to this question as it will be relative to the task at hand. But setups such as streaming servers, virtualisation, high-speed databases, SSRS, SAP, and cloud services would all run great from a stack of DC500R drives.

Pros

• Standard 2.5″ SATA drive for high compatibility and large-scale setups
• End-to-End and Power Loss Protection
• Consistent and reliable performance
• Built for server usage
• Up to 4TB-class drive options

Cons

• None as price really isn’t an issue if you need such drives

“Kingston continues its impressive DC drive series with the DC500. The DC500R delivers consistent and reliable performance figures as well as enterprise-class reliability.”

Thank you, Kingston, for providing us with this sample.