14 DAY TRIAL // Solid-state drives with 256 GB storage space are considered to be among the higher tier, both performance- and price-wise, so a drive with 1 TB capacity is quite a wonder. Kingfast has released such a wonder.
This isn't one of those PCI Express SSDs, which are basically add-in boards that cheat by using the much greater space available for NAND chips, and the much faster PCI Express interface (compared to SATA).
Instead, the KingFast C-Drive, as the new SSD is called, uses the standard 2.5-inch form factors and 9.5 mm thickness.
The way it achieves the capacity of 1 TB is not what one might expect.
The drive has two 512 GB subunits, each with its own LSI-SandForce SF-2281 controller. Those subunits are arranged in a RAID 0 configuration.
It's unclear if the RAID controller allows for the TRIM command to be used. SSDs in RAID have a history of not implementing that ability to clear up sectors and maintain performance over time. The announcement on TweakTown wasn't very explicit.
The performance is top notch though. Files can be read at up to 559 MB/s, while writing is accomplished at 532 MB/s on a good day.
Given that 5-10% of the bandwidth is consumed by various overheads, that's quite a feat. Those rates are superior to those of all other SATA III SSDs, to the best of our knowledge.
It's unclear what sort of customers, exactly, Kingfast is aiming for with the C-Drive 1 TB SSD. The price will determine the willingness of consumers to buy one, although it will definitely be huge in any case.
Customers from the server and data center industry may or may not show interest as well.
The KingFast C-Drive was on display at the Computex 2013 trade show, which took place in Taipei, Taiwan between June 4 and June 8.