To be born in a crisis and win all, or the story of Kingston
Hi% username%! You're really tired of the cloying stories of IT companies, where impeccable directors tirelessly make ingenious, ahead of their time products, and in their free time they speak aphorisms or walk on water. The legendary Kingston Technology was born far from under fabulous circumstances - two IT engineers at once lost all their savings in the stock markets and went to the boiling computer market as a young, tiny company. And now we will tell you how it turned out that already from the first months the company gained authority in the computer market.
Today, being not a motivated citizen or employee is wild and generally moveton. Oh, at least on duty "by whom do you see yourself in n years?" It is supposed to have a prepared phrase, as from the military charter. It is also considered reasonable to change the sphere of activity once every two or three years, mostly - so that creative people around do not laugh. At the same time, the status of “honored worker of hard work” today evokes only sympathetic smiles, but not respect.
')
And this is by no means new trends: the young computer industry in the 1980s breathed about the same matter. of the last century. That is, today we already understand that there was still an open field for iron and software achievements, but from the inside the situation looked about the same as it is seen today in smartphones. Two leading manufacturers (IBM and Apple) with large market shares, and around - a huge number of brands with a modest market share, small-scale "iron" of its own production and incomprehensible market prospects. Why, one wonders, in this strange “flea market”, push and compete with someone?
The founders of Kingston Technology are David San and John Tu.
So the founders of Kingston, engineers from Hong Kong, John Tu and David Sun, were not originally going to dive into the industry - friends released memory for the then popular computers DEC PDP-11 under their brand Camintonn. From 1980 to 1986, the company was profitable, but “we need to move on, open ourselves up in a new light” (what did you think?), So the company, which cost $ 6 million, was transferred by young IT entrepreneurs to the trader, and prepared to change the scope of activities ... but In 1987, there was a collapse of the US stock markets - the investments evaporated, and after all the work, the guys also went “in minus” for $ 1 million.
The impact on the wallet and self-esteem, frankly, was tremendous, but Tu and San did not panic and returned to work on what they did best - operational memory. So, on the crisis “ashes” in California, Kingston Technology emerged, named after the beloved musical group John Tu.
The head office of Kingston Technology in the early years after its foundation
In a time of crisis, everyone feels bad: both newcomers and crippled financial whipers of the market. But small companies in the era of "cut budgets" can achieve fantastic results simply by producing reliable and customized products.
And the thing is that already in the late 1980s, computers were a little like a monolithic something, and, obviously, along with standardization comes what? Universal modules! Manufacturers stopped splitting RAM onto the motherboard, computers with the ability to upgrade RAM were in vogue, but suppliers focused only on bread customers, such as Apple and IBM, and there was not enough memory for smaller brands. Therefore, John and David could not even imagine how much demand their debut SIMM module with modified circuitry would be.
Kingston DDR400 memory module
The leaders of Kingston Technology sent a trial batch of modules to a friend who owned a computer store in San Francisco. The modules were so stable and installed without a “tambourine” that, together with enthusiasm, a friend immediately asked for “50 thousand of the same”. Such volumes for a young company were still very heavy, which is why, therefore, Kingston handed over the module drawings to the store, and instead collected radio engineering parts to increase the circulation of components for the next customer. In a word, the profit returned to the guys in “natural form”, in the best traditions of the domestic factories of the 1990s, isn’t it?
Yes, only times were such that pride and exclusives were important, but mass character and the absence of bureaucracy. While large suppliers continued to produce memory modules "back to back" for Macintosh and IBM-PC circulations, retail left queuing for memory for "bureaucrats" and placed orders at Kingston - even then the company's memory was inexpensive, affordable and very reliable (100% testing all products since 1987, gentlemen). It even got to the point that many vendors deliberately mined branded PCs without RAM, in order to install Kingston modules into them.
Corporate customers love Kingston's memory for reliability and 100% quality testing
A little later, the memory deficit on the market began to decline, but the matter was already done - the authority and scale of Kingston Technology increased very quickly, and the Inc. magazine in 1992, awarded her first place in the list of the fastest growing companies in the United States.
As you can see, the company has achieved success even without roofing maneuvers and irreconcilable "market wars" with competitors. The recipe for Kingston to conquer the market turned out to be so simple that it would not even fit for a pretentious book on the road to success: “In a difficult situation, do what you can do, do it in good faith — and everything will work out”. After all, it was at the expense of sound calculation that the young company became so mature that it joined the "club of billionaires" and sold products for $ 1.3 billion already in 1995.
By the way, about billions - Kingston was interested in the successes of the Japanese, so in 1996 SoftBank holding bought 80% of the company's shares for $ 1.5 billion at a time. What happened next is still remembered in the industry today. As a result of the transaction, John Tu and David San allocated $ 100 million for employee benefits — an average of over 100 thousand dollars per person. Is this not an example of great team building, instead of kindergarten rituals adopted today? By the way, even after this takeover, the company still did not become Japanese - the founders bought the desired shares from SoftBank very well three years after the initial transaction.
Kingston Technology divisions in Taiwan and China
Just do not think that the guys from Kingston Technology took the time to rush in large sums of fun for the sake of: for the proceeds the company has developed offices and production in the US, UK, Taiwan, China and Ireland, and each new branch was almost perfect for working conditions (entering the TOP of the best employers guarantees it). As you can see, there is nothing in common with depressive factories where American premium smartphones are produced.
Kingston Technology Headquarters, top view
The main difference of Kingston Technology from its predecessor, Camintonn, was a different approach of managers to the release of "non-format" components for the company. To transform their offspring into a manufacturer in general of everything connected with a PC, Tu and San did not strive, just the number of “field kinks” in the computer industry was sometimes such that it was definitely worth intervening.
Speaking of kinks, we mean some wildly overvalued piece of hardware that the PC maker happily sells to customers and says, they say, "the only possible, unique accessory that will give you an unforgettable user experience." And then Kingston starts producing similar components, and it turns out that, with the deduction of marketing, the accessory is simple and should cost much less. This is the source of the many “unformatted” branches of Kingston products from the very beginning of the company.
For example, in the 1990s, the CPU upgrade package called Kingston Turbochip was extremely popular. They were a set of cooling system and Am5x86 processor with a simple installation for owners of 486 systems, or later versions, already using AMD K6-2. All this, of course, is "unsportsmanlike" from the point of view of the avid geek, but let's be frank - the customers needed a seamless upgrade then and then.
Kingston TurboChip 133 processor upgrade kit
Kingston's network equipment also fulfilled its noble mission - the company produced external and internal network cards compatible with Macintosh. At the same time, the workahard — a 16-port Fast Ethernet network hub saw the light.
Kingston Fast EtheRx KNE120TX Network PCI Adapter and Kingston KNE-PC2T Network PCMCIA Adapter
And even hard drives under the Kingston brand were really produced, and even “made a rustle” during their debut! For example, in 1997, the DataPak 520 model appeared, with a capacity of 520 MB, as it is not difficult to guess, which became the most capacious drive on the market. A little later, Kingston Technology will release a special StrataDrive software for migrating from the old hard drive to the new one - the program made a complete “cast” of the existing HDD, including the markup, the system, etc. and transferred it to the new model in an elementary way. The owner just had to wait until the operation was completed, and install a new hard disk in place of the old one.
Kingston DataPak Hard Drive (5 GB PC Card, 3990 RPM)
The subtitle, of course, sounds naive, but it’s time to clarify the company’s products, isn't it?
Memory has been and remains the strongest side of Kingston - over 40% of the market share of all DRAM modules in the world clearly speak of this. “Operative” comes from Fountain Valley is installed in a huge number of computers and laptops “from the factory”, works at the limit in countless servers, and even home printers and multifunction devices often turn the print queue on our chips (it's a pity that the legal subtleties do not allow us to mention specific models). In retail, Kingston's business is even cooler - and all because the company has been “holding the brand” for almost 30 years.
Kingston - the leader among manufacturers of memory modules
And let the ideology of the brand does not lead to records with “parrots” in popular benchmarks, the classic “iron” by the authorship of Kingston and today inspires reverence. What is, for example, a high-frequency (400-500 MHz) 512 MB memory module for the Apple Macintosh Powerbook G3? Just think: stable and fast gigabytes of RAM in the two thousandth year! Or extreme HyperX DDR PC-3500 RAM in 2002? And the gigabyte module SODIMM in 2003?
Even the 512-megabyte HyperX 400 MHz module with 2-2-2-5-1 timings still pleases the eye with its balance. On the whole, the gaming unit of Kingston, HyperX, was playing with muscles with might and main in the era of DDR2 and already in 2008 (!) It presented damn fast sets of 3x 1 GB DDR3 2000 MHz (CL9-9-9-27 @ 1.65v) for Intel X58 chipset. Just imagine how cool the “heated” Nehalem looked in an era when not everyone could afford Core2Quad!
Extremely fast memory. Kingston HyperX regularly sets speed records.
By the way, in 2011, HyperX memory immediately set two world records, when overclockers Benjamin "Benji Tshi" Bush and Jean Batista "marmot" Gerard managed to overclock a set of DDR3 HyperX modules from 2544 MHz (KHX2544C9D3T1FK2 / 2GX) to 3082 MHz with timings and charammines with KHX2544C9D3T1FK2 / 2GX and 3082 MHz with clock chimes and timing chimes.
Lab501 team overclocks HyperX KHX2544C9D3T1FK2 / 2GX memory up to 3600 MHz and beats three world records in a row (Romania, 2011)
Today, under the banner of Kingston, very fast, sophisticated and progressive memory modules of the gaming division of HyperX appear. In “civilian” computers and laptops, our ValueRAM modules carry the same ideology as in 1987: an affordable price and the highest reliability. All Kingston memory modules undergo Burn-In Test - 24 hours running at 100 degrees Celsius and increased voltage. Such a daily load emulates three months of normal work, and the pipeline receives only flawlessly working memory, with a lifetime warranty, by the way.
All Kingston memory undergoes hard stress testing before it reaches the counters
In the drives of the company there was not so much passion - in such products the emphasis was placed primarily on capacity and durability. After an unprecedented (already in 2000 something!) 2-gigabyte PC Card Type II initiative moved to more promising Compact Flash, and in 2001 Kingston introduced the 128 MB full-size Secure Digital - by the way, it was already certified for use in the first PDA running Windows.
Memory cards and Kingston in mobile (and not so) computers are a good old tradition
But what about flash drives? The first Data Traveler came to light in 2002 - when Windows XP was a young and promising system, 32 MB was a normal storage volume, and USB 1.1 was quite a fast interface. Sounds mundane? Then guess who released the world's first 256GB USB-drive in 2009, and then packed a terabyte of data into a standard USB flash drive in 2013?
DataTraveler HyperX Predator - the world's first “flash drive” with a capacity of 1 terabyte
Since then, much water has flowed under the bridge, and our flash drives have evolved and received specific “specializations”: monstrous storage devices with a capacity of over 500 GB, corporate “flash drives” with hardware encryption, “armor-piercing-tourist” models or just tiny models from the category “what the equipment has reached »Have completed our model range over the past 14 years. By the way, the Kingston DTE Privacy Edition was so cool that it was used by the US military in 2006 as a regular carrier for working with secret data.
There is no greater joy for a geek than installing a memory card of an out-of-memory capacity into an average gadget, and we are pleased to recall how countless “simple phones”, PDAs and smartphones became even cooler after people acquired the coveted MMC / SD / miniSD / microSD and dark times, long before the advent of 3G and streaming services, got on their cell phones as much music, movies and photos as they needed.
And the debut 32 MB MMC memory card in 2001, and 256 MB in 2006, already in microSD format, and 16 GB microSDHC in 2009 are not just numbers, but a whole bunch of warm memories of the era when telephones turned from communication tools into something more.
Today, Kingston manufactures memory cards for every taste.
Finally, SSD is a “modern history” iron. Kingston did not master the technology until it became mature enough, so the company’s debut in the field of solid-state drives can be considered 2009 - the debut of the SSDNow E and SSDNow M series, jointly with Intel production. The top model from the new line squeezed 250 MB / s in sequential read mode and 170 MB / s in write mode, and even in random read / write operations looked modest. But drives attracted business, went "run-in" in industrial computers. And only then, when the drives stopped scaring buyers away with their price tag, the V-series appeared (“V” means Vendetta Value, price) SSDNow - the first “national” line of devices with the ability to try “how is it without a hard disk? For cheap.
Kingston SSDNow V300: 19-nm MLC - to the masses!
Three years later, SSDNow V300 came out, already with “adults” 120 and 240 GB of storage capacity and became overwhelmingly popular, even in spite of the universal fashion of shaking ATTO Benchmark results and showing off linear speeds at the SATA-III limit. Gamers with no less pleasure chose HyperX 3K - the balance of characteristics and prices means for buyers much more than attractive figures with mediocre product quality. After all, we perfectly remember the fate of the brand, which set itself the goal of “speed at any cost”, isn't it?
Today, only consumer SSD Kingston has as many as six varieties - three for "home, for family," and three more - "fighters" of the HyperX division. By the way, we advise all lovers of speed to look into our very, very fast HyperX Predator PCI-E review.
Do not even hope that “all the melodies are sung, all the verses are written” - ahead of us are the heyday of DDR4 memory, tiny and prohibitively fast PCIe SSDs in M.2 format, wireless drives instead of archaic USB (and even Type-C), and carefully, tasteful customized peripherals for gamers. With all the outer conservatism in Kingston, there are truly “hotheads” (almost, like on a logo), which means - wait for new cool announcements!
Thank you for your attention and stay with Kingston on Hiktatimes!
For more information about Kingston and HyperX products, visit the company's official website . In choosing your kit HyperX help page with visual aids .
No luck on the stock exchange - lucky with RAM
Today, being not a motivated citizen or employee is wild and generally moveton. Oh, at least on duty "by whom do you see yourself in n years?" It is supposed to have a prepared phrase, as from the military charter. It is also considered reasonable to change the sphere of activity once every two or three years, mostly - so that creative people around do not laugh. At the same time, the status of “honored worker of hard work” today evokes only sympathetic smiles, but not respect.
')
And this is by no means new trends: the young computer industry in the 1980s breathed about the same matter. of the last century. That is, today we already understand that there was still an open field for iron and software achievements, but from the inside the situation looked about the same as it is seen today in smartphones. Two leading manufacturers (IBM and Apple) with large market shares, and around - a huge number of brands with a modest market share, small-scale "iron" of its own production and incomprehensible market prospects. Why, one wonders, in this strange “flea market”, push and compete with someone?
The founders of Kingston Technology are David San and John Tu.
So the founders of Kingston, engineers from Hong Kong, John Tu and David Sun, were not originally going to dive into the industry - friends released memory for the then popular computers DEC PDP-11 under their brand Camintonn. From 1980 to 1986, the company was profitable, but “we need to move on, open ourselves up in a new light” (what did you think?), So the company, which cost $ 6 million, was transferred by young IT entrepreneurs to the trader, and prepared to change the scope of activities ... but In 1987, there was a collapse of the US stock markets - the investments evaporated, and after all the work, the guys also went “in minus” for $ 1 million.
The impact on the wallet and self-esteem, frankly, was tremendous, but Tu and San did not panic and returned to work on what they did best - operational memory. So, on the crisis “ashes” in California, Kingston Technology emerged, named after the beloved musical group John Tu.
The head office of Kingston Technology in the early years after its foundation
Nice to be a small company
In a time of crisis, everyone feels bad: both newcomers and crippled financial whipers of the market. But small companies in the era of "cut budgets" can achieve fantastic results simply by producing reliable and customized products.
And the thing is that already in the late 1980s, computers were a little like a monolithic something, and, obviously, along with standardization comes what? Universal modules! Manufacturers stopped splitting RAM onto the motherboard, computers with the ability to upgrade RAM were in vogue, but suppliers focused only on bread customers, such as Apple and IBM, and there was not enough memory for smaller brands. Therefore, John and David could not even imagine how much demand their debut SIMM module with modified circuitry would be.
Kingston DDR400 memory module
The leaders of Kingston Technology sent a trial batch of modules to a friend who owned a computer store in San Francisco. The modules were so stable and installed without a “tambourine” that, together with enthusiasm, a friend immediately asked for “50 thousand of the same”. Such volumes for a young company were still very heavy, which is why, therefore, Kingston handed over the module drawings to the store, and instead collected radio engineering parts to increase the circulation of components for the next customer. In a word, the profit returned to the guys in “natural form”, in the best traditions of the domestic factories of the 1990s, isn’t it?
Yes, only times were such that pride and exclusives were important, but mass character and the absence of bureaucracy. While large suppliers continued to produce memory modules "back to back" for Macintosh and IBM-PC circulations, retail left queuing for memory for "bureaucrats" and placed orders at Kingston - even then the company's memory was inexpensive, affordable and very reliable (100% testing all products since 1987, gentlemen). It even got to the point that many vendors deliberately mined branded PCs without RAM, in order to install Kingston modules into them.
Corporate customers love Kingston's memory for reliability and 100% quality testing
A little later, the memory deficit on the market began to decline, but the matter was already done - the authority and scale of Kingston Technology increased very quickly, and the Inc. magazine in 1992, awarded her first place in the list of the fastest growing companies in the United States.
What if you are a billionaire
As you can see, the company has achieved success even without roofing maneuvers and irreconcilable "market wars" with competitors. The recipe for Kingston to conquer the market turned out to be so simple that it would not even fit for a pretentious book on the road to success: “In a difficult situation, do what you can do, do it in good faith — and everything will work out”. After all, it was at the expense of sound calculation that the young company became so mature that it joined the "club of billionaires" and sold products for $ 1.3 billion already in 1995.
By the way, about billions - Kingston was interested in the successes of the Japanese, so in 1996 SoftBank holding bought 80% of the company's shares for $ 1.5 billion at a time. What happened next is still remembered in the industry today. As a result of the transaction, John Tu and David San allocated $ 100 million for employee benefits — an average of over 100 thousand dollars per person. Is this not an example of great team building, instead of kindergarten rituals adopted today? By the way, even after this takeover, the company still did not become Japanese - the founders bought the desired shares from SoftBank very well three years after the initial transaction.
Kingston Technology divisions in Taiwan and China
Just do not think that the guys from Kingston Technology took the time to rush in large sums of fun for the sake of: for the proceeds the company has developed offices and production in the US, UK, Taiwan, China and Ireland, and each new branch was almost perfect for working conditions (entering the TOP of the best employers guarantees it). As you can see, there is nothing in common with depressive factories where American premium smartphones are produced.
Kingston Technology Headquarters, top view
It's not about technology, but how it is applied.
The main difference of Kingston Technology from its predecessor, Camintonn, was a different approach of managers to the release of "non-format" components for the company. To transform their offspring into a manufacturer in general of everything connected with a PC, Tu and San did not strive, just the number of “field kinks” in the computer industry was sometimes such that it was definitely worth intervening.
Speaking of kinks, we mean some wildly overvalued piece of hardware that the PC maker happily sells to customers and says, they say, "the only possible, unique accessory that will give you an unforgettable user experience." And then Kingston starts producing similar components, and it turns out that, with the deduction of marketing, the accessory is simple and should cost much less. This is the source of the many “unformatted” branches of Kingston products from the very beginning of the company.
For example, in the 1990s, the CPU upgrade package called Kingston Turbochip was extremely popular. They were a set of cooling system and Am5x86 processor with a simple installation for owners of 486 systems, or later versions, already using AMD K6-2. All this, of course, is "unsportsmanlike" from the point of view of the avid geek, but let's be frank - the customers needed a seamless upgrade then and then.
Kingston TurboChip 133 processor upgrade kit
Kingston's network equipment also fulfilled its noble mission - the company produced external and internal network cards compatible with Macintosh. At the same time, the workahard — a 16-port Fast Ethernet network hub saw the light.
Kingston Fast EtheRx KNE120TX Network PCI Adapter and Kingston KNE-PC2T Network PCMCIA Adapter
And even hard drives under the Kingston brand were really produced, and even “made a rustle” during their debut! For example, in 1997, the DataPak 520 model appeared, with a capacity of 520 MB, as it is not difficult to guess, which became the most capacious drive on the market. A little later, Kingston Technology will release a special StrataDrive software for migrating from the old hard drive to the new one - the program made a complete “cast” of the existing HDD, including the markup, the system, etc. and transferred it to the new model in an elementary way. The owner just had to wait until the operation was completed, and install a new hard disk in place of the old one.
Kingston DataPak Hard Drive (5 GB PC Card, 3990 RPM)
Who would you be and who are we?
The subtitle, of course, sounds naive, but it’s time to clarify the company’s products, isn't it?
Memory has been and remains the strongest side of Kingston - over 40% of the market share of all DRAM modules in the world clearly speak of this. “Operative” comes from Fountain Valley is installed in a huge number of computers and laptops “from the factory”, works at the limit in countless servers, and even home printers and multifunction devices often turn the print queue on our chips (it's a pity that the legal subtleties do not allow us to mention specific models). In retail, Kingston's business is even cooler - and all because the company has been “holding the brand” for almost 30 years.
Kingston - the leader among manufacturers of memory modules
And let the ideology of the brand does not lead to records with “parrots” in popular benchmarks, the classic “iron” by the authorship of Kingston and today inspires reverence. What is, for example, a high-frequency (400-500 MHz) 512 MB memory module for the Apple Macintosh Powerbook G3? Just think: stable and fast gigabytes of RAM in the two thousandth year! Or extreme HyperX DDR PC-3500 RAM in 2002? And the gigabyte module SODIMM in 2003?
Even the 512-megabyte HyperX 400 MHz module with 2-2-2-5-1 timings still pleases the eye with its balance. On the whole, the gaming unit of Kingston, HyperX, was playing with muscles with might and main in the era of DDR2 and already in 2008 (!) It presented damn fast sets of 3x 1 GB DDR3 2000 MHz (CL9-9-9-27 @ 1.65v) for Intel X58 chipset. Just imagine how cool the “heated” Nehalem looked in an era when not everyone could afford Core2Quad!
Extremely fast memory. Kingston HyperX regularly sets speed records.
By the way, in 2011, HyperX memory immediately set two world records, when overclockers Benjamin "Benji Tshi" Bush and Jean Batista "marmot" Gerard managed to overclock a set of DDR3 HyperX modules from 2544 MHz (KHX2544C9D3T1FK2 / 2GX) to 3082 MHz with timings and charammines with KHX2544C9D3T1FK2 / 2GX and 3082 MHz with clock chimes and timing chimes.
Lab501 team overclocks HyperX KHX2544C9D3T1FK2 / 2GX memory up to 3600 MHz and beats three world records in a row (Romania, 2011)
Today, under the banner of Kingston, very fast, sophisticated and progressive memory modules of the gaming division of HyperX appear. In “civilian” computers and laptops, our ValueRAM modules carry the same ideology as in 1987: an affordable price and the highest reliability. All Kingston memory modules undergo Burn-In Test - 24 hours running at 100 degrees Celsius and increased voltage. Such a daily load emulates three months of normal work, and the pipeline receives only flawlessly working memory, with a lifetime warranty, by the way.
All Kingston memory undergoes hard stress testing before it reaches the counters
In the drives of the company there was not so much passion - in such products the emphasis was placed primarily on capacity and durability. After an unprecedented (already in 2000 something!) 2-gigabyte PC Card Type II initiative moved to more promising Compact Flash, and in 2001 Kingston introduced the 128 MB full-size Secure Digital - by the way, it was already certified for use in the first PDA running Windows.
Memory cards and Kingston in mobile (and not so) computers are a good old tradition
But what about flash drives? The first Data Traveler came to light in 2002 - when Windows XP was a young and promising system, 32 MB was a normal storage volume, and USB 1.1 was quite a fast interface. Sounds mundane? Then guess who released the world's first 256GB USB-drive in 2009, and then packed a terabyte of data into a standard USB flash drive in 2013?
DataTraveler HyperX Predator - the world's first “flash drive” with a capacity of 1 terabyte
Since then, much water has flowed under the bridge, and our flash drives have evolved and received specific “specializations”: monstrous storage devices with a capacity of over 500 GB, corporate “flash drives” with hardware encryption, “armor-piercing-tourist” models or just tiny models from the category “what the equipment has reached »Have completed our model range over the past 14 years. By the way, the Kingston DTE Privacy Edition was so cool that it was used by the US military in 2006 as a regular carrier for working with secret data.
There is no greater joy for a geek than installing a memory card of an out-of-memory capacity into an average gadget, and we are pleased to recall how countless “simple phones”, PDAs and smartphones became even cooler after people acquired the coveted MMC / SD / miniSD / microSD and dark times, long before the advent of 3G and streaming services, got on their cell phones as much music, movies and photos as they needed.
And the debut 32 MB MMC memory card in 2001, and 256 MB in 2006, already in microSD format, and 16 GB microSDHC in 2009 are not just numbers, but a whole bunch of warm memories of the era when telephones turned from communication tools into something more.
Today, Kingston manufactures memory cards for every taste.
Finally, SSD is a “modern history” iron. Kingston did not master the technology until it became mature enough, so the company’s debut in the field of solid-state drives can be considered 2009 - the debut of the SSDNow E and SSDNow M series, jointly with Intel production. The top model from the new line squeezed 250 MB / s in sequential read mode and 170 MB / s in write mode, and even in random read / write operations looked modest. But drives attracted business, went "run-in" in industrial computers. And only then, when the drives stopped scaring buyers away with their price tag, the V-series appeared (“V” means Vendetta Value, price) SSDNow - the first “national” line of devices with the ability to try “how is it without a hard disk? For cheap.
Kingston SSDNow V300: 19-nm MLC - to the masses!
Three years later, SSDNow V300 came out, already with “adults” 120 and 240 GB of storage capacity and became overwhelmingly popular, even in spite of the universal fashion of shaking ATTO Benchmark results and showing off linear speeds at the SATA-III limit. Gamers with no less pleasure chose HyperX 3K - the balance of characteristics and prices means for buyers much more than attractive figures with mediocre product quality. After all, we perfectly remember the fate of the brand, which set itself the goal of “speed at any cost”, isn't it?
Today, only consumer SSD Kingston has as many as six varieties - three for "home, for family," and three more - "fighters" of the HyperX division. By the way, we advise all lovers of speed to look into our very, very fast HyperX Predator PCI-E review.
What will happen next?
Do not even hope that “all the melodies are sung, all the verses are written” - ahead of us are the heyday of DDR4 memory, tiny and prohibitively fast PCIe SSDs in M.2 format, wireless drives instead of archaic USB (and even Type-C), and carefully, tasteful customized peripherals for gamers. With all the outer conservatism in Kingston, there are truly “hotheads” (almost, like on a logo), which means - wait for new cool announcements!
Thank you for your attention and stay with Kingston on Hiktatimes!
For more information about Kingston and HyperX products, visit the company's official website . In choosing your kit HyperX help page with visual aids .
Our previous posts:
- HyperX Impact memory lines - mobile - does not mean slow
- HyperX DDR3 memory rulers - what is what in the model range?
- HyperX DDR4 memory rulers - what to choose for your computer?
- USB drive HyperX Savage USB 3.1 Gen 1 with a capacity of 128 gigabytes
- Interesting facts from the history of solid-state drives
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/391695/
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