Kingmax Announces New Line Of SF-2200 Based SSDs As Sandforce Drive Market Approaches Max Q

Kingmax, well known for their high performance memory and storage products, has announced the release of their SMP32 Client and SMU32 Client Pro SSDs.

Based on the SF-2281, both the regular and Pro versions will feature read/write speeds of 550MB/s and 520MB/s respectively.

The Vanilla Client drive will offer up to 60K read and 35K write IOPS, while the Client Pro will offer 60K IOPS performance for both reads and writes.

The drives will be available in a 7mm form factor providing capacities of 60GB, 120GB, 240GB and 480GB. The new products will come with a three year standard warranty. Pricing has yet to be announced.

Those of you who have followed the industry long enough will no doubt remember Kingmax’s innovative Tiny BGA memory modules released several years ago to significant fanfare. The firm was actually one of the first on the market with high performance memory designed specifically for overclocking.

Although the company’s presence in the US RAM market isn’t what it used to be, like most other companies dealing with memory products, they’re interested in getting a piece of the enthusiast SSD pie, and like many other manufacturers, are utilizing LSI SandForce controllers. This is by no means a bad thing, as the reasons for LSI SandForce’s success are pretty much self-evident.

This does, however, present a situation in which product differentiation may end up becoming ever more difficult as it seems the LSI SandForce based SSD product market may have reached a kind of apex, at least when comes to SF-2281 industry penetration. Such a circumstance could actually have positive repercussions though, as manufacturers will consequently have more of an incentive to go out of their way to convince potential buyers to consider their SandForce based drives over a competitor’s.

This could mean things such as more competitive pricing, longer warranties, bundled hardware or even the inclusion of software many consumers might find useful. (Anyone else like the idea of being able to convert your SSD into a caching drive?)

Whatever ends up happening, the mass proliferation LSI SandForce based SSDs may actually end up giving consumers more options. That, I think we can all agree, is a market reality that everybody can get behind.

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