Kingston HyperX SandForce-Powered SSDs Reach Retail

Just as it has promised during the Computex 2011 fair, Kingston has recently started shipping the high-performance HyperX SSD, which has already made its way into retail stores across Japan.

So far, Kingston has been pretty successful in the low-end and mainstream solid state drive market, but the HyperX marks the company's entrance in the high-end SSD space, since this is their first storage device to be based on a SandForce processor.

This is the same SF-2281 controller as that found in OCZ's top of the line Vertex 3 model, and is paired together with 25nm NAND flash cells manufactured by IMFT.

As a result, the HyperX SSD is capable of reaching sequential read/write transfer speeds of 525MB/s and 480MB/s, respectively, and its 4K random performance is rated at 95,000 read IOPS and 60,000 write IOPS.

Like most other SF-2000 SSD models, the HyperX connects to the system via a SATA 6Gbps interface, and Kingston has also added support for configurable over provisioning, enabling users to increase the drive's speed and performance at the expense of overall capacity.

The SSD will be available in 120GB and 240GB configurations, and just like most of Kingston's other SSDs is also available in a kit form and is backed by a five-year warranty.

Besides the drive itself, this kit includes a 2.5-inch to 3.5-inch adapter, an external USB enclosure, the Acronis imaging software, a SATA cable and a screwdriver.

Right now, Japanese retail stores only sell the 240GB version of Kingston's solid state drive, which carries a price tag of 45000 Yen, or about $581.17 if converted into US dollars. Sadly, we don't know how long it will take for the HyperX drive to arrive in other parts of the world. (via ASCII)