Kingston following Intel into the SSD game

Kingston has announced it's teaming up with Intel -- new to the SSD market itself -- to market flash memory-based drives for laptops and servers. This is a bold move for Kingston, which is usually known to stick to mature markets; clearly, the company sees the technology's potential. The effort "almost flies in the face of the usual Kingston model," said spokesman Dave Leong. "We are large and in charge!" (OK, so we made that last part up.) This is all set to pop off in Q4 2008 -- Samsung, you've been warned.

[strider_mt2k @ Oct 3rd 2008 8:51AM]

Nice!

Now make ONE product I can trust and we can talk about buying this SSD of yours.

[ed. @ Oct 3rd 2008 9:05AM]

whats wrong with kingston products? I've bought loads of their ram and other memory devices without any problem here in Australia. The genuine stuff is made in Japan. Just don't get the fake stuff.

[Flashpoint @ Oct 3rd 2008 9:12AM]

It will be a LONG time before I put faith into SSD's. I'd say, i'll wait till their 3rd or 4th generation when they'll hold over a Terrabyte. Until then, I'll watch carefully the reviews and test as well as reliability reports.

I don't mind Kinsington. I've used their Ram a long time. Not that RAM normally fails - so that might not be a decent argument.

[tekd @ Oct 7th 2008 12:31AM]

Just FYI there are genuine Kingston products that aren't made in Japan so don't freak out if you own some Kingston stuff that isn't from Japan.
Counterfeiters would just counterfeit the "Made in Japan" part anyway so it's not a good way to tell if your stuff is genuine.

[allislost @ Oct 3rd 2008 9:02AM]

Nope... this is not good. Any time memory makers plunge themselves into an unfamiliar market the only thing that will happen is the mass production of inferior technologies coupled with unenthusiastic design, a point that can be easily be proven by the undisputed fact, in all realities, that these and many other devices following the same trend, parallel to the netbook market, will only offer something that you can't wear... as a hat!

[ed. @ Oct 3rd 2008 9:09AM]

wtf you talking about man? OCZ make the best SSD's at the moment and they were originally RAM makers. I hear transcend also make good SSD's and they were originally RAM and flash memory makers.

[Cursor @ Oct 3rd 2008 9:12AM]

I don't know what you're talking about. I can't see how this would be a bad thing. If only one company builds the product, then they set the price. If there are more players in the game, costs will go down and the price will follow. It'll be nice for everyone to be able to benefit from these new technologies.

Competition sparks innovation...

[sk @ Oct 3rd 2008 9:32AM]

@ed.
OZC SDD's are certainly not the best. In fact they have some serious issues with the controller from Jmicro. Intel has a much better controller. Read this article at anandtech.com for some insight.
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3403&p=7

[ed. @ Oct 3rd 2008 9:55AM]

point taken although technically thats JMicron's fault. I guess OCZ should have done some more research on that particular controller. Still doesnt validate allislost's argument that memory makers will be bad SSD makers.

[allislost @ Oct 3rd 2008 6:06PM]

I'm guessing most of these comments were posted by people that have a really short reading attention span... or maybe they don't like to were... hats!

[I LOVE THE CAPS LOCK KEY @ Oct 4th 2008 9:00PM]

All Jmicron SATA controllers have serious issues, this includes ones integrated in to motherboards or used in peripheral addon cards. Their compatibility troubles are of epic proportions, avoid them if you can.

[Cursor @ Oct 3rd 2008 9:10AM]

It'll be nice to see some healthy competition to get the price of SSD drives down.

[Luke D @ Oct 3rd 2008 9:24AM]

Seems that the number of mechanical hard drive makers is shrinking and the number of SSD market players increasing...

[koolatron @ Oct 3rd 2008 9:51AM]

This makes sense to me. With DRAM prices not bouncing back any time soon, I bet Kingston's profit margins are razor thin on existing products, if they exist at all. This is their (imho, very smart) move at leveraging their successful flash memory resale business into SSDs, which at this point are hardly considered risky. At the moment, Intel and Samsung are enjoying fat margins by charging whatever the hell they want for their MLC drives. Why not get a piece of the pie for yourself, if you can?

[xValentine @ Oct 3rd 2008 10:03AM]

Following Intel into the SSD Game ?

So this means that this will also be expensive.

[jaloonz @ Oct 3rd 2008 10:43AM]

It is weird that they didn't jump into the field of earlier, given that they are a major supplier of end-user memory-based products.

[koolatron @ Oct 3rd 2008 1:17PM]

also, @allislost:
Kingston doesn't make memory. They're a glorified distributor; they buy first- and second-quality material, rebrand it, and sell it into the consumer and white-box markets, respectively. Only a handful of companies actually make RAM, like Samsung, Hynix, Micron, and Qimonda.

[Thrillhouse @ Oct 3rd 2008 1:30PM]

that photoshop job is just lazy...at least insert a 'i can haz ssd' text box or something in there, please.

[E71 @ Oct 3rd 2008 6:36PM]

I so would love an SSD replacement for the 4 x 1TB drives on my file server. They're currently not RAID1/5 or anything and have a lot of files I'll be really devastated to lose should anything happen.

However I doubt I'll ever get to use SSD because they just won't be able to catch up with mechanical drives in terms of capacity. By the time SSD's become 1TB in size and just as afordable, mechanical drives would probably reach 2, 3 or even 4TB (which I'd need as the content on my fileserver expands daily).

SSD will that one thing that always escapes me. :(