Kingston DCP1000 Enterprise NVMe SSD Review (1.6TB) – 7GB/s & 1 Mil IOPS in a Single HHHL SSD

TEST SETUP AND METHODOLOGY

In testing all enterprise drives we focus on long-term stability. In doing so, we stress products not only to their maximum rates, but also with workloads suited to enterprise environments. We use many off-the-shelf tests to determine performance, but we also have specialized tests to explore specific behaviors we encounter. With enterprise drives, you will see that we do not focus on many consumer-level use-cases.

When testing SSDs, the drive is purged and then preconditioned into a steady state before capturing its performance results. We also disable all write caching on the DUT when possible, this ensures consistent results that are compliant with SNIA standards. Our hope is that we present tangible results that provide relevant information to the buying public.

SYSTEM COMPONENTS

PC CHASSIS:	Thermaltake Urban T81
MOTHERBOARD:	ASRock X99 WS-E
CPU:	Intel Xeon E5-2690 v3
CPU COOLER:	Thermaltake Water 3.0 Ultimate
POWER SUPPLY:	Thermaltake Toughpower 1500W Gold
GRAPHICS:	MSI GT 720
SYSTEM COOLING:	be quiet! Silent Wings 2
MEMORY:	Kingston ValueRAM DDR4 2400MHz ECC 64GB
STORAGE:	Crucial MX200 500GB
OS:	Windows Server 2012 R2
MOBO FIRMWARE:	1.70

This Test Bench build was the result of some great relationships and purchase; our appreciation goes to those who jumped in specifically to help the cause. Key contributors to this build are our friends at ASRock for the motherboard and CPU, be quiet! for the cooling fans, and Thermaltake for the case. We have detailed all components in the table below and they are all linked should you wish to make a duplicate of our system as so many seem to do, or check out the price of any single component. As always, we appreciate your support in any purchase through our links!

SNIA TESTING

The Storage Networking Industry Association has an entire industry accepted performance test specification for solid state storage devices. Some of the tests are complicated to perform, but they allow us to look at some important performance metrics in a standard, objective way.

SNIA’s Performance Test Specification (PTS) includes IOPS testing, but it is much more comprehensive than just running 4KB writes with Iometer. SNIA testing is more like a marathon than a sprint. In total, there are 25 rounds of tests, each lasting 56 minutes. Each round consists of 8 different block sizes (512 bytes through 1MB) and 7 different access patterns (100% reads to 100% writes). After 25 rounds are finished (just a bit longer than 23 hours), we record the average performance of 4 rounds after we enter steady state.

• Purge: Secure Erase, Format Unit, or vender specific
• Preconditioning: 2x capacity fill with 128K sequential writes
• Each round is composed of .5K, 4K, 8K, 16K, 32K, 64K, 128K, and 1MB accesses
• Each access size is run at 100%, 95%, 65%, 50%, 35%, 5%, and 0% Read/Write Mixes, each for one minute.
• The test is composed of 25 rounds (one round takes 56 minutes, 25 rounds = 1,400 minutes)

Unlike some of our other performance tests, the SNIA tests only last for a relatively short period of time each (1 minute), but they cover many more access patterns and transfer sizes to give us a good picture of the SSD’s performance. All tests were done at a QD of 256. As the results show, the Kingston DCP1000 was able to pull off nearly 1.1 million IOPS at 100% 4K read. At the 65/35% read/write workload it achieved 285K IOPS and during 100% writes it averaged 211K IOPS. The 8K and 16K results scale well here. At 100% 8K reads it delivers nearly double the performance we seen with the Micron 9100 MAX and over 200K IOPS more than the Intel DC P3608.

LATENCY

To specifically measure latency, we use a series of 512b, 4K, and 8K measurements. At each block size, latency is measured for 100% read, 65% read/35% write, and 100% write/0% read mixes.

Latency results from this test show to be very similar to that of the Intel DC P3608. during 100% read workloads the Kingston DCP1000 excels. Its latency is very low compared to mixed or write workloads, although, those numbers are still very good.

Similar to the average latency results, during 100% reads the DCP1000 is a total beast. Latencies during those workloads are all under 3ms, better than any other NVMe SSD we have tested on this test system. Looking at the maximum write and mixed workload latency figures from our testing, however, a different picture is drawn. While the average latencies prove to be very competitive, the Kingston DCP1000’s maximum latency results are significantly higher than that of other PCIe NVMe SSDs we have tested, understanding of course that the Kingston DCP1000 is directed at read intensive operations.  We will elaborate on the observation with respect to this workload a bit more on this in the conclusion.