CES 2009: Kingston enters SSD market

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Kingston, the memory manufacturer, has finally entered the nascent SSD market with two drives that it claimed are the best performing on the market.

The two new drives are the SSDNow E Series and the SSDnow M Series and are based on Intel’s SSD designs. The E series is a 32GB drive based on the fast single level cell (SLC) technology aimed at the enterprise market, where fast IOPS (Input/Output Per Second) is required. Kingston said it can deliver read speeds of 250MB/sec and write speeds of 170MB/sec.

The M series drive is based on the cheaper MLC tech and, while read speeds are the same as its sibling at 250MB/sec, write speeds are limited to 70MB/sec.

The difference between the two is reflected in the price, with the 32GB E series drive (SNE125-S2/32GB) costing £591 excluding VAT, and the 80GB M-Series drive (SNM125-S2/80GB) costing £433.98 excluding VAT.

“We did a lot of research before entering the [SSD] market,” Jim Selby, Kingston’s European product manger told IT PRO. "SSDs have been around for 18 months now, but it’s taken this long for us to be comfortable with them."

Of the new Kingston drives, he said: “For us, positioning is everything. The 32GB drive is aimed at the data centre, for financial transactions, database servers for e-commerce. We think of it as part of a caching array, delivering incredibly fast access to the most important data and being able to make transactions with that data 10 of thousands of times a second.

“Current [competitor] drives on the market are really version 1.0. And while the market is not yet mature it is maturing. A lot of that is down to the controller; if you have a cheap controller you have a rubbish product.”

On the prospects of SSD this year, Selby said: “We’re in a transitional period and pricing will drop through 2009 along with further technical advancements in the technology.”

Selby refused to be drawn on what those improvements might be, though.

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