Memory specialists Kingston have hit us with a one-two combo of brand new solid state drives and a whole new memory module they're calling the Beast.
As if the memory market wasn't already macho enough, Kingston are looking to sex things up with the latest addition to their Predator line-up of memory upgrades. It's all ostensibly dual-channel DDR3 in speeds ranging from 1600MHz up to 2400MHz and in kits of up to 64GB (sixty-four gigabytes! I felt that needed emphasising), with a range of memory latency ratings too. The Beast title is being given to the modules carrying the new “viciously aggressive” heatspreader design and that 64GB capacity is the largest in the HyperX performance memory family.
Silly name aside, these should be pretty good sticks, especially at the lower latency end. And Kingston can usually be relied upon to get as aggressive with its pricing as it does its heatspreader design and naming conventions. Grr!
Not content with that Kingston are also releasing a new generation of SSDNow solid state drives, the V300. The V series of SSDs are Kingston's value range of drives - that's not to say though that they're any slouches.
As is Kingston's way, these new drives are all running the same SF-2281 LSI SandForce controller we've seen in countless drives, but this time it's being paired up with new 19nm NAND Flash modules. Kingston have also been working with LSI to customise the firmware of the drive to optimise it for the new memory too.
That should help with the drop-off in performance you traditionally get when it comes to working with incompressible data using the SandForce controller. That's already compressed files such as images and video, which we shunt around quite a lot.
You can pick the new SSDNow V300 series up in three flavours, 60GB, 120GB and 240GB, in either desktop or laptop upgrade trim. At the moment we can only find them in 60GB and 120GB capacities though, for £60 and £100 respectively.
We should be seeing review samples very soon.
