Intel helps Kingston corner the SSD market

MEMORY MODULE MAKER Kingston Technology has been looking at teaming up with Intel to flog Solid State Drives to businesses.

Kingston, whose core business is bunging memory chips onto circuit boards to boost computer performance, is now dipping its toe into the flash memory for enterprise market. This after the company has already carved out a $4.5 billion a year sales niche for itself in flash memory cards for consumer electronics.

Usually conservative Kingston seems to be throwing caution to the wind by moving into the emerging SSD market, as the memory chip drives become increasingly popular over the slower, less reliable spinning disk drives, despite being costlier.

Spokesking David Leong told the INQ his firm’s new product would be called SSDNow and would initially consist of two capacities, a 32 gigabyte SSD and an 80 gigabyte version. Leong noted both would initially be available to enterprise customers in the US only within this next quarter. Pricing and a fixed release date are apparently yet to be determined.

Leong said he was optimistic for the product’s prospects, noting "This is one market where we believe it will grow quite a bit".

Leong wasn’t specific about whether Kingston would eventually sell its SSDs for the consumer PC market, noting that currently the firm would resell drives made by Intel to big corporate clients who regularly buy memory modules as upgrades for their computers.

But despite Kingston’s long “engineering and marketing relationship with Intel”, the firm isn’t shouting the news from the rooftops just yet. Leong says his firm won’t even provide a press release until its new product is ready for launch.

Eager consumers can only hope Kingston’s new products will be ready in a flash and show themselves as solid performers. µ