Kingston Delivers Its First Business SSD Based on SandForce Controllers

Kingston has announced earlier today the introduction of the company's first business-equipped solid state drives based on the second-generation SandForce SSD processors with native support for the SATA 6Gbps interface.

The new drives were released into the KC100 series, which currently comprises three models offering capacities of 120GB, 240GB and 480GB.

At the heart of the new drives stands the SF-2281 controller, which was developed for being used together with consumer SSDs, so users won't actually get the enterprise grade feature introduced in the SF-2500/2600 controller series (these include an external SAS bridge and a special firmware revision with support for non-512B sectors).

Nonetheless, the KC100 drives still get AES-128 and AES-256 data encryption support and can deliver some impressive performance.

Kingston actually says that KC100 solid state drives are capable of reaching sequential read and write transfer speeds of 555/510 MB/s, while random 4K performance is rated at 90,000/70,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second).

Of course, these speeds depend on the model chosen, the 120GB drive being rather surprisingly the fastest of the bunch.

“Kingston is thrilled to offer the new business-equipped KC100 SSD to enterprises,” said Ariel Perez, SSD business manager, Kingston.

“Data integrity is important to every company and the KC100 is sure to deliver the highest standards of data protection on the client systems in which it is installed.

“Users can rest assured that with the combination of its endurance, reliability and performance, KC100 will become a very important asset in the workplace,” concluded the company's rep.

Kingston has already started shipping the first batches of KC100 solid state drives, so these are expected to become available shortly. Pricing is set at $353, $665 and $1,285 for the 120GB, 240GB and 480GB versions, respectively.