14 DAY TRIAL // Kingston's SSDNow collection of solid-state drives has grown by four, as the company has brought forth the KC300 series, composed of units based on SandForce controllers.
Or perhaps we should say one SandForce controller. After all, all four new drives are powered by the same chip: the LSI SandForce second-generation SF-2281 processor.
It is that chip that allows the data to be read off the drives at 525 MB/s and for it to be written at 500 MB/s.
What's more, the random 4K read and write performance, like the sequential speed mentioned above for that matter, depends on the drive capacity, but it is high in all instances.
In order, the 120 GB, 180 GB, 240 GB and 480 GB SSDs accomplish read/write rates of 84,000/64,000, 84,0000/64,000, 84,000/52,000, 73,000/32,000 IOPS, respectively.
Those numbers should be more than enough for any notebooks that the SSDNow KC300 land in.
"Kingston's new SSDNow KC300 is designed to help business, mobile and power users extend the lifespan and significantly improve the performance of their PC or notebook with higher speeds, greater stability and reliability," said Ariel Perez, SSD business manager, Kingston.
"KC300 provides greater power efficiency than the traditional hard disk drive, thus allowing users to keep on working longer without having to recharge the battery."
The feature list of the 2.5-inch, 7mm SSDNow KC300 includes things like DuraWrite intelligent compression engine (extends lifespan), Advanced Power Management, SATA 6 Gbps, RAISE technology (reduces the number of uncorrectable errors), and 1 million hours MTBF life expectancy.
Enterprise-grade SMART attributes are included as well, "allowing IT departments to monitor wear range data, SSD life left, write amplification and total bytes written."
Kingston's press release did not have any pricing information, but we're not that surprised. If this is a notebook SSD, laptop makers are the only ones that need to know, and they'll be able to find out by talking to Kingston directly, when placing orders.
Of course, we have no doubt that retail availability will ramp up eventually too.