Kingston Technology has expanded its data centre storage line-up with the launch of the DC1000B M.2 NVMe SSD, which has been optimised for server boot drive applications and features power loss protection. 

The DC1000B is a high performance M.2 (2280 NVMe PCIe SSD which uses the latest Gen 3.0 x 4 PCIe interface with 64-layer 3D TLC NAND. Kingston says that this particular model offers data centres a cost-effective boot drive solution with the reassurance that they are purchasing an SSD designed for server use. 

The DC1000B has been engineered to be used as an internal boot drive in high-volume rack-mount servers, as well as for use in purpose-built systems that require a high-performance M.2 SSD that includes on-board power loss protection (PLP).

M.2 NVMe SSDs are evolving within the data centre, providing efficiencies in booting servers to preserve valuable front-loading drive bays for data storage. Whitebox and Tier 1 Server OEMs are beginning to equip server motherboards with one, or sometimes two, M.2 sockets for boot purposes. While the M.2 form factor was originally designed as a client SSD form factor, its small physical size and high performance make it attractive for server use. 

Boot drives are used primarily for booting an OS, but in many use cases today the boot drive has a secondary purpose: logging application data and/or configured as a high-speed local cache drive. The DC1000B was therefore designed with added endurance (0.5 DWPD for 5 years) to handle the OS workload as well as the extra write workload of caching and data logging. In addition to being developed for long-term reliability, the DC1000B is designed to deliver enterprise-level performance consistency and low latency features.

Kingston has made the DC1000B M.2 NVMe SSD available in both 240GB and 480GB capacity configurations. Read and write speeds are rated at 3,400MB/s and 500MB/s, respectively, while pricing has yet to be announced.