If you've been wanting to get on board the super fast PCIexpress storage bandwagon for a while but have been put off by the price, now's your change. Kingston has debuted a new series of NVMe drives called the A1000 range and they not only offer speeds more than twice that of your average SATA III SSD, but cost little more than that older form factor too.
The drives are available in three form-factors, 240GB, 480GB and 960GB and offer pretty great performance across the range. Here are the numbers, as per Hexus:
Sequential Read/Write:
240GB: up to 1,500/800MB/s
480GB: up to 1,500/900MB/s
960GB: up to 1,500/1,000MB/s
Random 4K Read/Write:
240GB: up to 100,000/80,000MB/s
480GB: up to 100,000/90,000MB/s
960GB: up to 120,000/100,000MB/s
The drives measure just 22 x 80 x 3.5mm and sports chips on just one side of the PCB, so can slot into small form factor systems with ease. They also come with a five-year warranty.
They aren't quite available yet, but when they are, they'll be priced at the competitive rate of $100 for the base model, $180 for the 480GB model and as little as $300 for the terabyte one. Sure that's a little more expensive than your average SATA SSD, but not by much.
