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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