Kingston had done plenty to get us excited before meeting with them today at Caesar’s Palace. The excitement of the HyperX Anniversary StarCraft II tournament was enough to win Adam over, and while the reveal of a USB 3.0 1TB flash drive gave everyone plenty to talk about. Though David Leong attended the Pepcom Digital Experience the night before, you can imagine he had plenty of an audience. Today we met with David and his team for a one-on-one guide through the grapevine.
Written by: Wes and Adam
Pictures by: Wes
Stage left as we walked into the Emperor’s ballroom were the StarCraft II players we mentioned in our earlier article, two on stage and several more to the side, including the shoutcasters. As we sat down with David, two players were going head-to-head, it wasn’t long before we heard the casters yell “GG!”.
David wasted no time pulling out the Predator, the much-talked about 1TB USB 3.0 flash drive. The actual unit is very thick, with multiple PCB’s (essentially multiple flash drives) stacked on one another to achieve the desired capacity and speeds.
A 512GB version of the Predator is expected to ship in the coming weeks, while the 1TB version is slated for quarter two. Price is a big touchpoint right now, as it’s listed on Amazon for $1750 as MSRP, and David did confirm that’s what they’re going with for the moment:
“The thing about MSRP, which none of us at Kingston like it, we have to set a price somewhere. $1750 to start, let’s hope that price comes down. And it will. It definitely will, over time. Hopefully fairly fast.”
The same design is available in a much thinner, much more affordable options of 32GB and 64GB. These will be available soon, and at about $40 to $60 and $80 to $120, respectively.
In addition to the StarCraft II tournament, Kingston is also celebrating the 10th Anniversary with a special edition HyperX memory modules, with a special silver finish heatsink.
Camron met with us next to go over SSDs with exhibits to demonstrate the different ways to take advantage of the technologies. The first was a Danger Den box equipped with PCI Express 3.0 and RAID controllers combined with SSDs. With 16 of the HyperX SSDs and RAID 0 across all 16, they achieved a write speed of about 5800 MB/s and over 6000 MB/s read speed, and 150,000 IOPS.
A similar experiment was shown with a focus on server-class SSD technologies from Kingston, using commercially available products. 1.8 million IOPS was reached using RAID 0 across 24 SSDs, for under $75,000 total build cost. Although this is more than you and I have in our pocket, this is considerably less than what it would have cost in the past.
Demonstrations using the HyperX memory modules, including the new “Beast” series, to upgrade basic and high-end gaming systems were also on hand, while the Intel N.U.C. (Next Unit of Computing) was also present, equipped with 16GB of HyperX SODIMM DDR3 and a 120GB mSATA to demonstrate the power these little boxes can handle.
The end of the meeting was a tour through the past of Kingston and HyperX, with glass displays showcasing the different products over the years, with many members of the team reminiscing about when these archaic pieces were considered top of the line.