Computex 2014: Kingston Announces V310 & HyperX Fury SSDs, Shows SF3700 And Marvell PCIe SSDs
by Kristian Vättö on June 8, 2014 10:11 AM ESTUnlike many manufacturers, Kingston didn’t have a booth or suite at Computex but instead they held a one-day HyperX gaming event on the top floor of one of Taipei’s many skyscrapers. In addition to the gaming event, Kingston had several upcoming products to show, ranging from Phison based V310 SSDs to PCIe 2.0 x4 SSD with a brand new Marvell controller.
The V310 will be the successor to V300 and is based on Phison S8 controller instead of the SF-2281 found in the V300. The NAND will be Micron’s 128Gbit 20nm MLC, which enables Kingston to go all the way to up to 960GB. Pricing should be quite similar to the V300 but the difference is that the V310 provides the same performance regardless of the data type (incompressible vs compressible). I was told that the official release should take place in about six weeks, so it looks like July will be a busy timeframe for new SSDs.
Kingston is also bringing a new model to their HyperX family: the HyperX Fury. This is yet another SF-2281 drive and similar to the V310 it utilizes Micron’s 128Gbit 20nm MLC NAND. This provides lower cost compared to the HyperX 3K and Kingston is aiming the Fury at the lower-end gaming segment. Capacities are limited to just 120GB and 240GB and the drives should be available soon.
Now, the PCIe stuff. Kingston had two PCIe SSDs to show —one being the SF3700 based HyperX Predator that was already showcased at CES earlier this year and the other being a Marvell based PCIe 2.0 x4 drive. Similar to everyone else, Kingston couldn't really tell us anything new about the SF3700 but Kingston is still aiming for Q4 release. Kingston had the same 80/20 read/write demo to show that LSI showed us earlier but Kingston was able to tell me that the writes are not 100% compressible. Performance was the same 1.3GB/s that we saw earlier, so nothing new in the SF3700 front really.
As for the Marvell based drive, this is the first time Kingston is working with Marvell and they actually had to hire a few engineers since the Marvell platform is different from the others. The firmware development is still in the early stages but Kingston had a live demo running that showed sequential read performance of nearly 1.4GB/s. Release timeframe is still up in the air due to firmware development but we will probably see the drive some time next year.
Kingston also had some DDR4 at their event but the details were very limited. They will have a full lineup ready when the X99 launches but at this point, they were not willing to discuss any details regarding speeds. The module they had at the show was a 2133MHz one (for servers I think) but we will likely see higher speeds for the desktop market. Desktop capacities will be limited to 8GB at launch while server DIMMs will be available in 16GB as well.
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Mushkins - Monday, June 9, 2014 - link
I'm curious what makes you think desktop users will only be interested in 16GB DIMMS. Unless you're running a workstation for a specialized, RAM intensive task like video editing even 8GB is overkill. Most people aren't running this configuration.For gaming, most of the heavy lifting is done by VRAM right on the video card, the applications themselves are rarely pushing more than 4GB while running, making your typical gaming rig more than fine with 8GB of ram.
For standard computing habits, we're barely at the point where 4GB is becoming "not enough."
Considering RAM literally does nothing for your system if you're not actively using it and anything more than 8GB is still well into the overkill range for 99% of builds, I cant imagine a desktop board with only two RAM slots being a problem. Plus, remember that filling up all those slots reduces performance due to management overhead, so assuming all ratings are equal 2x8 will eke out a little more performance than 4x4. If anything, i'm surprised more desktop boards haven't dropped down to only offering two DIMMs, more than that is definitely in server or specialty workstation range these days and can be offered on more specialized boards.
stickmansam - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
I hit about 7GB of usage with just my chrome 30+ tabs and a game open. If I didn't have swap, my system would crashIts a fallacy to think that "most people don't need more than x of y" because if more is available, more would be used
Daniel Egger - Sunday, June 8, 2014 - link
Kingston has decent products but the SSDs are just plain crap. I had a V200 once, after 6 months of *very* light use (in a backup notebook I rarely use) it produced plenty of read and write errors so I had to recover the remains of the FS (about 5% permanent damage), had the thing replaced by a new one (took the dealer about 3 weeks to source a new one) put all the stuff back on, after 3 months the exact same thing happened again but unfortunately the dealer figured after another 4 months of putting me on hold that they couldn't get a new one so I eventually I got my money back.For regular SSDs I'll never buy anything else but Samsung and Intel again; I do have plenty of SSDs at home/family/office and those two brands never failed me even just once.
Senti - Sunday, June 8, 2014 - link
We have 5 HyperX'es at work and they all work well with no problems till today.I've heard bad words about Kingston SSDs, but I think all were limited to cheaper models only.
serndipity - Monday, June 16, 2014 - link
Kingston and PNY caught bait-and-switching cheaper components after good reviews.http://mobile.extremetech.com/latest/221524-ssd-sh...