Kingston takes on Intel in the business class SSD market

Kingston technology are introducing a new business class range of solid state drives to be known as the “KC 100 SSDNOW” drives. The range seems to be similar and rival that of Intel’s planned 520 series business class solid state drives we saw yesterday. The KC100 SSDs offer the latest Sandforce 22xx controller speeds of up to 555MB/s read, 510MB/s write and up to 90K IOPs (up to 60K sustained) with all specifications being variant depending on the model’s capacity. Kingston is using the standard 2.5″ format on the latest SATA III 6GB/s interface which is not surprising but where they do pull a trump card is with pre-embedded data encryption technology.

The KC100 drives offer two data encryption engines already built in: AES 128 and AES 256 which gives added piece of mind to those business’ looking to protect important information. The MTBF is 1 million hours and that is backed by a 5 year warranty for piece of mind. The full range of specifications including pricing can be seen below:

Kingston SSDNow KC100 Features and Specifications:

• Sequential Reads 6Gb/s: Based on “out-of-box performance” with ATTO Disk Benchmark 2.41
  • SATA Rev. 3.0 – 120GB & 240GB: 555MB/s; 480GB: 540MB/s
  • SATA Rev. 2.0 – 120GB, 240GB & 480GB: 280MB/s
• Sequential Writes 6Gb/s: Based on “out-of-box performance” with ATTO Disk Benchmark 2.41
  • SATA Rev. 3.0 – 120GB & 240GB: 510MB/s; 480GB: 450MB/s
  • SATA Rev. 2.0 – 120GB, 240GB & 480GB: 260MB/s
• Sustained Random 4K Read/Write: Based on “out-of-box performance” with IOMeter08
  • 120GB: 20,000 / 60,000 IOPS
  • 240GB: 40,000 / 60,000 IOPS
  • 480GB: 60,000/45,000 IOPS
• Max Random 4K Read/Write: Based on “out-of-box performance” with IOMeter08
  • 120GB: 90,000 / 70,000 IOPS
  • 240GB: 95,000 / 60,000 IOPS
  • 480GB: 77,000 / 45,000 IOPS
• Form factor: 2.5″
• Interface: SATA Rev. 3.0 (6Gb/s), SATA Rev 2.0 (3Gb/s) and SATA Rev 1.0 (1.5Gb/s)
• Guaranteed: five-year Kingston warranty, 24/7 tech support
• Enterprise S.M.A.R.T Tools: Reliability Tracking, Usage Statistics, Life Remaining, Power Loss, Wear Leveling, Temperature, Drive Life Protection
• Capacity³: 120GB, 240GB, 480GB
• Storage temperatures: -40°C – 85°C
• Operating temperatures: 0°C – 70°C
• Dimensions: 69.85mm x 100mm x 9.5mm
• Vibration operating: 2.17G
• Vibration non-operating: 20G
• Operating shock: 1500G
• Power specs: 0.455 W (TYP) Idle / 1.6 W (TYP) Read / 2.05 W (TYP) Write