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There was a time when acquiring enterprise or data center SSDs meant going through a vendor rep, navigating complex configurations, and waiting for pricing. While that hands-on expertise still has its place, many businesses today simply want a fast, transparent, and frictionless way to get the hardware they need. With AI taking center stage across industries, this shift toward streamlined infrastructure procurement is only accelerating. Companies like Microgrid’s 4 AI are catering to a new breed of clients running under 20 racks of compute and requiring less than 10MW of power. These companies may demand compact, efficient, and sometimes off-the-grid all-in-one solutions.
This is exactly where Kingston steps in with their DC3000ME Gen 5 Data Center SSD. Designed for enterprise workloads and optimized for today’s high-performance AI and data-intensive environments, it delivers the reliability, speed, and scalability that modern businesses expect, without the red tape. Availability is key and the sales move to make data center SSDs available through e-tailers has been a long time coming.
Kingston’s DC3000ME enterprise solution is a PCIe 5.0 four-lane NVMe 2.0 SSD and it can simply be purchased through Amazon. It is available in a U.2 2.5″ x 15mm form factor and is available in 3.84TB, 7.68TB, and 15.36TB capacities. Just a heads up, this SSD is the EXACT same component configuration of the MemBlaze 7946 and Flume IO 5900.
The outer casing of our DC3000ME sample is of a thick black anodized aluminum with a ribbed top for effective heat dissipation. Inside lies a two-sided PCB which contains the Marvel ‘Bravera’ SC5 16-channel NVMe SSD controller, along with Micron 232-layer 3D eTLC B58r NAND flash memory which can run at up to 2400MT/s. The Bravera controller is based on the TSMC 12nm ARM 32-bit Cortex R8 architecture. This is Kingston’s first PCIe 5.0 enterprise SSD release and listed specs describe variable throughput as high as 14GB/s read and 10GB/s write, along with up to 2800K read and 500K write IOPS for the 7.68TB sample we are testing today.
The Kingston DC3000ME Gen5 SSD is a 1-Drive Write Per Day (1DWPD) SSD that achieves endurance of 700TBW for the 3.84TB version and then doubles for every capacity point. This SSD identifies a very respectable 2,000,000 MTBF (mean time between failures) and comes with a 5-year limited warranty.
Power efficiency for the DC3000ME is listed at 8 watt idle with 8.2 watt max read and 24 watt max write. It’s feature set includes TRIM, SMART, power loss protection, AES 256-bit encryption with end-to-end data protection, and TCG Opal 2.0 security standard. It is compatible with Windows Server, Ubuntu, RHEL, CentOS, SLES (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and VMWare ESXi. As we spoke of the performance being variable above, this listed specification should elaborate:
Checking Amazon, we can see the Kingston DC3000ME available for 512.95 (3.84TB), $905.16 (7.68TB) and $1579.99 (15.36TB).