News

posted on 02 June 2008 15:51

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Kingston Technology, the market-leading supplier of after-market memory modules, is going to enter the solid state flash memory drive (SSD) market and supply the aftermarket for laptop computers.

Kingston has a leading 23 percent share in the market for memory modules and buys in chips from DRAM foundries which it then manufactures into modules. It also has a flash USB drive and flash card business. The company is headquartered in Orange County, California, and has five manufacturing plants: one in California; two in China; one in Malaysia; and one in Taiwan.

It is a privately-held company which has had the same two owners for more than 25 years. The company's revenues are in the multi-billion dollar area. In calendar 2007 it recorded revenues of $1.1 billion in EMEA and shipped 4 million flash devices there in just one month. It sells through distributors to resellers and retailers with an emphasis on product quality and long-term relationships.

There is Kingston, thinks, a mass market developing for such flash SSDs. Bernd Dombrowsky, Inside Sales Director for Kingston's EMEA organisation, said: "Until the end of this year the flash market is in its infancy. There is a lot of interest but you are really skimming the market."

Marc Bernier of Kingston's EMEA Research & Development team, said that SSDs are attractive to notebook users because they are faster than hard drives, much more resistant to knocks and bumps and draw less power.

Notebook users will, it is thought, want to replace or augment hard drives with flash SSDs to gain extra storage speed and the other SSD benefits. Dombrowsky said that users currently upgrade memory modules by unscrewing three or four screws in a notebook or desktop or server computers and that they would do the same things to upgrade to SSD storage.

Bernier said that the Kingston SSD would use multi-level cell (MLC) technology to reach the HDD-like capacity levels needed and didn't demur when 300-500GB capacities were mentioned. Nor did he dissent from the suggestion that, as a plug-in SATA disk drive replacement it would need a SATA interface.

Kingston had no comment to make about the SSD controllers needed other than agreeing that wear-leveling algorithms were a popular way of dealing with the write cycle limitations of NAND flash memory. Bernier said that there would be no Kingston intellectual property in the controllers; they would be bought-in units which Kingston would use in manufacturing its SSDs along with the bought-in NAND chips.

We should envisage customers buying Kingston-branded SSDs in desktop, small server and notebook retailers such as Frys in the USA and PC World in the UK.

Dombrowsky said that Kingston had no plans for now to enter the high-performance, storage array tier zero, flash SSD market exemplified by STEC's contract with EMC for its Symmetrix arrays, but: "If the market for high performance (hard) drive replacement is there we'll supply it."

A potential competitor for Kingston in the notebook SSD aftermarket is SanDisk, which has its own foundry. Dombrowsky said: "SanDisk and all the other NAND manufacturers need a killer application to eat all their output and the one killer application they see is SSD." SanDisk has a ine of SSD products and CEO Eli Hariri has been vocally bullish about the flash SSD market, although admitting SanDisk is behind the curve with MLC flash.

Dombrowsky pointed out that notebooks and UMPCs like Asus' EEE PC and the MacBook Air were not designed for user replacement of hard drives, saying: "We'll focus on machines where it is possible."

A Kingston SSD, when it arrives, won't be sold as the lowest-price product. Instead it will, like Kingston DRAM modules, be sold as a high-qualty, dependable product that users can rely on.

Kingston's impending flash SSD market entry is another indication that there will be strong competition in the market and confirms the idea that flash SSDs are a threat to serial ATA hard disk drives. Dombrowsky said it was logical for hard disk manufacturers like Seagate to enter the SSD market but they had better move fast. Otherwise, like certain film camera manufacturers that failed to react quickly enough to digital cameras, they would become failing entities.

That means Western Digital, Hitachi and Fujitsu primarily. Samsung has a strong foot in both flash and hard drive camps as does Toshiba which is energetically strengthening its flash capabilities. The odds have to be high that we'll see flash SSD announcements from both Hitachi GST and Western Digital in the coming months.

In the kingdom of the drive the flash man would be king.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}