14 DAY TRIAL // Enterprise storage units can be deliberately underwhelming, when they are used by common office client PCs, and significantly better than consumer drives when they are used in servers and data centers.
Still, even though a degree of expenditure is expected from data center solutions, some companies still want to save cash.
Cue Kingston's SSDNow E50 series. The line of solid state drives is made of powerful units which, nonetheless, make some concessions in order to sell for significantly less than SSDNow E100.
"We found that there was a demand within our customer base and partner community for an SSD that offers enterprise-strength reliability and superior features but with lower endurance capabilities and associated costs," said Ariel Perez, SSD business manager, Kingston.
"Based on this feedback, we developed SSDNow E50 and are pleased to further expand Kingston's SSD family to support the evolving needs of our customers and partners."
Sadly, Kingston didn't say, in its press release, what the price of the 2.5-inch, 7mm SSDs will be. It did include all the technical details, though.
First off, there will be three options, of 100 GB, 240 GB and 480 GB, all driven by SandForce SF2581 controllers.
The sequential read/write performance, as allowed by SATA Rev. 3.0, is of up to 550 MB/s and 530 MB/s, respectively.
It's actually strange in fact. The 100 GB and 240 GB units seem the fastest, at 530 MB/s write. The 480 GB drive only manages 500. In the past, higher-capacity SSDs proved quicker than the others. Clearly, this is an exception.
Anyway, the Kingston SSDNow KC300 also have AES 128-bit encryption and maximum read/write performance of up to 85,000/80,000 IOPS.
Finally, max storage temperatures are of 40°C to 85°C and maximum operating temperatures are of 0°C to 70°C. Kingston expects the newcomers to be used in virtualization.