Kingston Launches PCIe 3.0 x8 DCP-1000 SSDs Into Data Centers

Kingston announced today a new enterprise-based SSD, the DCP-1000, and it’s an intriguing NVMe enabled PCIe card targeting data center deployments. Developed in partnership with Liqid, Kingston’s drive incorporates four 8-channel SSD controllers on a single card.

The drive makes use of an x8 PCIe 3.0 slot (it actually requires PCIe 3.0, rather than 2.0) and can hit a staggering 6.8GB/s reads, 6GB/s writes, and over 1.1 million 4K random IOPS! For comparison, something like an Intel 750 is about 2GB/s, and Samsung’s 960 Pro M.2 drive is just over 3GB/s.

DCP1000 at CES 2017

While multi-controller cards have been done by others, this time Liqid’s software management expertise allows the drive to offer a wide range of software-customizable configurations. While the top performance figures have the card configured in x4 RAID 0 mode, more conservative users could instead set up a RAID 1 array or probably even a RAID 0+1 or 10 configuration.

There are few details given about price, and even the spec-sheet remains mum as to what NAND is in use. As for the SoC controller all we know is that it was “developed and powered by Liqid” and is designed to link up for software management for fine-grained control and monitoring.

As a data center class drive, it of course includes some serious power-loss protection via the large, visible bank of solid-caps along the top, as well as be backed by a five-year warranty. ECC data protection is also enabled.