Kingston Shows Off Speedy M.2 PCI-Express SSDs At CES

Although CES ended last week, there are a few products that we didn't manage to cover at the show but believe are quite interesting. One of these products is Kingston's new HyperX Predator PCI-Express SSDs, which are M.2 SSDs that offer some blazing fast performance.

The drives are powered by a Marvell 88SS9293 controller and communicate with the PC through four PCI-Express 2.0 lanes, meaning that they have up to 20 Gb/s in bandwidth to play with. Kingston rates the SSDs with read speeds of 1400 MB/s and write speeds of up to 1000 MB/s, although this probably varies a bit depending on the capacity.

For those of you who don't have a high-speed M.2 slot, Kingston also built a half-height, half-length PCI-Express 4x adapter. Kingston will ship a different SKU from the standard SSDs that includes this adapter with the M.2 SSD pre-mounted on it.

With many high-end motherboards gaining PCI-Express-based M.2 slots, we especially like to see that there are more and more M.2 SSDs coming for them. Many early M.2 SSDs were wired to a SATA interface, meaning that their bandwidth was, despite using a faster socket on the motherboard, restricted to just 6 Gb/s, which completely defeats the purpose of the M.2 slot.

Kingston did not indicate exactly how much the SSDs would cost or when they would be available, but we reckon it will be any moment now for the 240 GB and 480 GB variants. Kingston mentioned that the 960 GB variant will come towards the end of Q1 or the start of Q2.

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Niels Broekhuijsen

Niels Broekhuijsen is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He reviews cases, water cooling and pc builds.

  • milkod2001
    Can this thing boot? Will it work with my 'ancient' Haswell 4.770K and z87 mobo without bios upgrades and all that hassle? How much? Will take if it's in price range $1/GB.
    Reply
  • Haravikk
    It's nice that there's an adapter, but I think I'd prefer an adapter cable, since it doesn't really matter where the drive goes in the system, as with this you're blocking a slot with a tiny little drive.
    Reply
  • KenZen2B
    If you look at all the space on the board to place M2 connectors, why didn't they offer a board with 2 M2 connectors on each side of the board ? They could sell the board with one of the four M2 slots filled and then let the user fill the other M2 connectors as needed. This would give the user up to 3.8 TB of storage.
    Reply
  • Larry Litmanen
    They need to stop offering PS/2 port, DVI/VGA, heck even USB 2. Clean it up and start offering more useful features like HDMI, Display port and M.2.
    Reply