Bjorn3D @ Computex 2010: Kingston Announces USB 3.0 HyperX SSD and 64GB SDXC Memory Card

Peter Kapas June 6, 2010 Articles, COMPUTEX, Event Coverage, Hardware, Other, Reviews & Articles 1 Comment

Kingston just announced their plans for their new USB 3.0 HyperX SSD and the long waiting 64GB SDXC memory cards. These products will have blazing speeds delivered straight through the USB 3.0 and SDXC interface.

Kingston’s Past and Future Plans

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Kingston has been striving to be the number one Flash and DRAM memory manufacturer for quite some time now. As a matter a fact, according to iSuppli, a market research firm, Kingston has come to be the number one to hold 40% of the DRAM market share. But it does not end there. Even with the bad economy, Kingston is proud to announce to be financially secure. Last year in 2009, Kingston managed to rack up $4.1 Billion in revenue, surpassing their previous year. The future looks quite bright from them as well, considering that Kingston will be one of the few to adapt to the new external USB 3.0 SSD market with their new USB 3.0 HyperX SSDs. In the next few months, we will also see their latest 64GB SDXC flash memory cards and the latest and one of the fastest HyperX 2544MHz Dual-Channel DDR3 memories.

USB 3.0 HyperX SSD

With data getting bigger every day, from photos to videos and to even applications, manufacturers needed to come out with faster solutions for backing up your data. This is where Kingston comes in with their External USB 3.0 HyperX SSDs. For video enthusiasts like me, the fastest and most affordable solution till now was an external firewire based hard drive, but now with the new HyperX SSD from Kingston, the write and read speeds will be 3x-4x faster then what we have seen so far, making backing up data much faster and enjoyable.

On the following pictures, we see the USB 3.0 HyperX SSDs as well as some tests. The first test on the left with the blue results shows the read and write speeds of the new external HyperX SSD running through the new USB 3.0 interface, while the results shown in green are showing the results on a USB 2.0 interface. We can see a tremendous speed increase just by using USB 3.0. So this means that the Kingston HyperX SSDs will be also compatible with USB 2.0 in case the user did not get a chance to upgrade their system yet.

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We do not know the MSRP of the HyperX SSDs, but we do know that they should be hitting the shelves sometime in August, 2010. There should be three capacities to pick from, the 64GB, 128GB and 256GB.

Kingston 64GB SDXC Memory Card

Kingston also announced their new 64GB SDXC Class 10 memory cards during Computex 2010. These cards will have faster transfer speeds than the standard SDHC cards currently available on the market, and they will also come in larger capacities from 32GB to 2TB in the near future. At the moment, Kingston only announced the 64GB model, with a minimum transfer speed of 10MB/s, up to 60MB/s read speed and 35MB/s write speed.

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Kingston mentioned that they will continue working on improving the read and write speeds because the actual predicted speeds for SDXC cards are rated at 105MB/s and in the future at around 300MB/s. Some camera manufacturers like Canon already started shipping their products with SDXC interfaces. As write speeds get faster in the future, I will also expect video quality to go up on consumer and prosumer level cameras and camcorders.

The new SDXC cards will utilize the new patented exFAT file system, which is suppose to support up to around 64GB file sizes. This means that unless digital cameras like the Canon T2i have limitations in their video recording itself, we could continue shooting after the 4GB limit we see on the FAT32 file system.

However, one disadvantage about the new SDXC memory cards is that they are not backwards compatible with SD or SDHC card readers.

HyperX 2544MHz DDR3 Memory

As of now, Kingston only told us a little about their new Dual-Channel HyperX 2544MHz DDR3 Memory, and we will cover more information about it in future articles and reviews.

We’ll have more in-depth article coming of the product releases in the following days. We’ll also have more information from David Sun, Co-Founder and Vice President of Kingston, as well as we’ll take you through Kingston’s Factory Tour here in Taiwan.