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Hardware Report: Kingston to Sell Intel SSDs
Shane McGlaun (Blog) - October 3, 2008 9:37 AM
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Kingston will resell Intel SSDs to its hardware partners.  (Source: Intel)
Kingston and Intel work together to sell Intel's new SSDs

SSDs are trickling into the consumer market in notebooks and especially netbook computers. In the enterprise market, the benefits of a SSD are more apparent when used in high-demand environments.

Kingston and Intel have teamed up to market Intel SSDs to the computer industry according to Mobile Tech Today. Kingston is one of the leading makers of memory products for computers and its wares find their way into desktop and notebook systems from a variety of PC makers like Dell, HP and IBM among others.

Intel's SSDs showed up on a roadmap in August and launched a few weeks ago. The firm makes a pair of SSDs with one aimed at notebook computers and the other aimed at enterprise use in servers. Intel's SSDs have read speeds of up to 240MB per second and write speeds of up to 170MB per second. The enterprise series uses a standard 2.5-inch form factor and the consumer-oriented series uses a 1.8-inch form factor.

Traditionally, Kingston is trepid in entering new markets. A good example is the several years Kingston waited to enter the flash-based memory card market. The same market now accounts for a full quarter of Kingston's yearly sales. Kingston attributes its late entry and rapid growth in the memory card market to its broad range of partner firms it sells to.

The SSD market is far from mature and has a long way to go by most accounts before it reaches maturity. Kingston is getting into SSDs while the market is emerging, a big change for the firm. Kingston spokesman David Leong said, "[entering the SSD market] almost flies in the face of the usual Kingston model. This is one market where we believe it will grow quite a bit. The opportunity was there to jump into it right now with Intel."

Mobile Tech Today reports that Kingston and Intel have partnered together in a similar fashion before. The two firms worked together on a memory module that improved the reliability and performance of memory inside servers.

Under the partnership, Kingston will resell Intel SSDs to its partners including Dell and HP. It's not clear at this point if Kingston will be selling both the server and consumer versions of Intel's SSD or the server version alone. The market for consumer SSDs is still very soft and it's likely that Kingston will stick to the enterprise market at least in the beginning.

As SSDs become more popular in the consumer notebook market -- something not likely to happen until prices fall and storage capacities go up -- Kingston will be in a very good position to sell the consumer Intel SSDs for integration into notebook and netbook systems.

Kingston is a main rival to SanDisk in the flash storage and media market. SanDisk has been in the news recently as its falling stock price has made it the target of acquisition talks and rumors. SanDisk's board unanimously turned down a purchase offer form electronics giant Samsung. Interestingly, after SanDisk turned down Samsung, Intel was one of the names rumored to be interested in acquiring SanDisk. That rumor has yet to be confirmed.

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Intel in retail?
By DallasTexas on 10/3/2008 4:20:58 PM , Rating: 2
Where did it say intel is in the SSD retail business? Are you waiting for an Intel branded SSD in retail? There's your problem right there.




RE: Intel in retail?
By PandaBear on 10/4/2008 1:13:41 AM , Rating: 5
Kingston is a company that doesn't make its own products. Its USB is Samsung, its SD card is Toshiba, and soon SSD will be Intel.

What it means is Intel will design and build the drive, and Kingston will guarantee to buy 100k+ of them per year, and sell them to make a profit. If Kingston couldn't sell them, then it is Kingston's responsibility to do rebates, discounts, marketing, warranty, PR, etc.

Intel doesn't like to do small business with too low of a margin, Kingston has good marketing so that's what they will be doing.


RE: Intel in retail?
By mindless1 on 10/4/2008 5:36:26 PM , Rating: 2
The unfortunate part is that Kingston seems to overcharge for many of their memory products, if they don't rethink this they may have a small window of opportunity to make good profits before other players have SSD with close enough performance:cost ratio, as price is still going to be the main thing slowing adoption by the masses. The world wants cheaper computers, then later they think about failures.

If it were not the case the lower end notebooks, CPUs, etc, wouldn't be the best sellers. IOW, most people don't have WD Raptors in their system even though it's faster than most other drives - the cost wasn't justified.


RE: Intel in retail?
By PandaBear on 10/4/2008 7:07:19 PM , Rating: 3
I think Kingston is "fairly" priced in most cases. They are not dumping their products at a loss (no sane business would) like ADATA, and since they are re-badge, they can always switch to the winner of the day without being hit with a failed design that bust.

To lower price you have to lower component (NAND) price. Currently it is still expensive to make a large or fast or reliable SSD, you have to wait till 32nm or smaller to see the price really drop to affordable, then it is like 1999 all over again.


RE: Intel in retail?
By mindless1 on 10/4/2008 11:31:22 PM , Rating: 2
What's fair about selling the same thing at a higher price? Often you can't even assume buying two of the same part number from Kingston will mean getting the same memory because they mix-n-match use of whatever chips they get cheapest in the same model of product.

You write that no sane business would dump product and yet plenty of companies still in business do sell for less than Kingston. Basically, it makes no sense to buy any Kingston product today from a consumer's standpoint. I'm sure they have more overhead from things like advertising but that only helps someone who has no idea what's out there, not those who are veterans at buying computer parts (which just happens to be the majority who make the purchasing decisions if considering volume rather than # of buying events).


RE: Intel in retail?
By PandaBear on 10/5/2008 3:02:27 AM , Rating: 2
I don't know why are you holding grudges against Kingston, but I think their flash memory is very cheap ($15 for 4GB sometimes) compare to other brands like Lexar and SanDisk. Everyone buy memories from buy guys and put labels on them, it is not just the memory business, but all commodities. You don't get the same hard drive from DELL, they always use at least 4 suppliers for risk management and have them out bid each others for low cost for the same reliability.

If you are whinning that ADATA or PQI is selling for cheaper than Kingston, you have to understand why. True, no sane business would dump unless 1) their supplier is dumping and they get the parts for cheap, 2) they need to sell a certain volume to get a discount, so the last 10% of the business is just to get rid of stuck inventory, 3) depreciation in memory business for large company (say, SanDisk), can be $10M per month, so the longer you wait, the more you lose.

Intel doesn't like to deal with customers that are picky and cheap, that's why they still leave the consumer motherboard business to the Taiwanese MB companies, and they intend to sell their own SSD to large OEM that buy in large volume. It cost a lot of money and energy to deal with companies like Bestbuy and fight for shelf space, talk to the press, RMA, supply chain, etc.

Newsflash: veterans at buying computer parts are only good at buying parts after they are design, not picking a winning design that is yet to be build and have no prototype. Unless you have teams of people who run the latest benchmark in labs with prototype stuff and then tell the suppliers what to build for you 6 months down the road, the suppliers probably wouldn't know what to sell you. OEM like Dell knows what they want (cheap, good enough performance, and high reliability), but customers don't always (fast, cheap, and good enough reliability). Kingston guarantees a volume, and that takes out a lot of business risk from Intel.

Just because there is a cheaper alternative doesn't means it is the best solution. I'll never buy from some of the Chinese/Taiwanese brand memory because I've seen in the lab how poorly build they are (no wear leveling, spontaneous timeout due to bad garbage collection, like the JMicro SSD controller). Your usage pattern may not fail, but it may also fail miserably. Kingston has been pretty good to me so far and all their stuffs work for me, so I don't know why are you saying they are overpriced. Can you give an example.


RE: Intel in retail?
By Calin on 10/5/2008 1:45:17 PM , Rating: 2
I have a Dell laptop (Vostro 1500), and while there are two possible WiFi cards on it, there are no less than 11 (eleven) possible DVD units (all DVD-RW) for the same SERVICE TAG.
So, this happens with most big companies, on a larger or smaller level


RE: Intel in retail?
By mindless1 on 10/5/2008 5:17:38 PM , Rating: 2
It's not a grudge to state fact. Fact is, the equivalent product from Kingston costs more the majority of the time.

Don't bother trying to cherry-pick one exception from Lexar or Sandisk (who BTW is also overpriced on many of their products), do the sensible thing any experienced purchaser does and check prices on several items at someplace like Newegg, making sure you also check the specs so it's an equivalent part not just the slowest 4GB flash you can buy from Kingston opposed to something better or cheaper from others.

You wrote "Intel doesn't like to deal with customers that are picky or cheap". That is arbitrary made-up nonsense. They prefer not to deal with retail sales but it has nothing to do with picky or cheap.

I'm well aware of the reasons for Intel going with Kingston, but it bears no weight on your other arguments nor does it detract from what I wrote about their higher than average market prices.

You wrote "just because there is a cheaper alternative doesn't mean it is the best solution". Ok then, quit babbling and tell us why Kingston is best. Kingston is no higher quality than many other alternatives (some extreme example of terrible manufacturing only bears on that product, NOT all the other alternative products), no higher performing at the same price point, and costs more than average. In other words there's little about kingston that is equal let alone better except from Intel's standpoint of their volume.

Next you went on to write about a JMicro SSD controller when it's not Kingston picking controllers.

They are overpriced because you can get the same quality, capacity, and performance for less (on average, random sales on random products will always make a very few exceptions) from others. This is well established but ok I will give an example, a totally random one. It will literally be the very first comparison I can find at Newegg by typing "Memory" in their search box. Having searched for "memory" you're brought to a page of featured memory deals. In case those are sale prices we will reject those deals and go to the top category (for no other reason than it's first on the list), desktop memory. Next a "Power Search" for Kingston products - they have two listings, "Kingston HyperX" and "Kingston Technology".

Now let's pick the most popular contemporary speed and capacity of DDR2 memory. Is that capacity 2 x 1GB or 2 x 2GB? I think the result will be the same either way but like before I will just pick the first option whenever possible so 2 x 1GB. Speed PC2-6400.

Kingston has one listing that is 36.48, it's low bin CAS6. Now go back one webpage to the Power Search again and instead of selecting Kingston, select "Any" Manufacturer but leave the other variables the same - 2 x 1GB and PC2-6400. From these search results you will see several entries from OCZ, Corsair, Crucial, Wintec.

I've examined enough Kingston memory to know it's not higher than average build quality, but either you are deliberately biased to the point if introducing misleading info or your supposed time in some "lab" hasn't exposed you to many products at all because if it had you would have encountered plenty of products with equal quality to Kingston, not just those with a Lexar or Sandisk branding on them. Didn't you even realize the majority of relabel brands out there are made by a few major manufacturers? This is even more true when talking about flash memory.

Go ahead and buy Kingston if you want but the truth is most experienced buyers don't and that includes both end users, computer shop, and OEM purchasing departments. I'm sure some computer shops will order it by special request but it's not the default config.

Remember something, I wouldn't have written about Kingston's prices without reason. I constantly keep an eye on memory prices.


RE: Intel in retail?
By PandaBear on 10/6/2008 4:01:38 PM , Rating: 3
Cool down dude.

I'm not saying Kingston is best, but as far as I have seen, I haven't found any crap that is made from them yet. I have seen many from other more generic brands like ADATA and OCZ, like those brands that uses JMicro controller (Kingston not using them is a good thing).

Example. Since you like newegg so much, I'll use newegg as an example. 2GB SD card, Kingston is 6.99 with free shipping, 226 ratings of 5 eggs. The cheapest competitor is Transend with 4.15 with 6.99 shipping and only 74 ratings of 4 eggs.

Example. 1GB USB drive on newegg. Kingston is 5.49 with 6.99 shipping, 5 year warranty, and 150 ratings of 5 eggs. Transend is 4.99 with 6.99 shipping, 1 year warranty, and 22 ratings of 5 eggs. Transend has faster transfer speed (10MS/S vs 6MB/S), 50 cents cheaper, so is a better deal, but that doesn't mean Kingston is overpriced.

You are the one that needs to get over your bias. I don't trust your reason to write about Kingston. True, they may be overpriced on DRAM, but DRAM is much easier to make than flash drive. There is no wear leveling and the only thing you have to worry about is voltage and compatibility (and overclocking for some).

Last time I check Bestbuy and Circuit City aren't carrying ADATA or Transend, and I'm not sure if that means anything but they don't have the volume of Kingston. Why? Kingston have good relationship with Samsung and Toshiba, and when Samsung wants to dump memory last DEC, it sold 1 million chips of 8G bit each to Kingston in one shot on the promise that it wouldn't be sold as chips on the spot market to drive down the contract price.

Now slow down and think. Why would I, someone that works in SanDisk, defend our competitor (Kingston)? Because their stuff ain't bad and they are not overpriced. True, you might once in a while find good deals in other companies, because they once in a while get good deals from their suppliers that over produce. But in the long run everyone has about the same cost (unless they screwed up and/or score a jack pot). Your good deal may not last, and Kingston may give you good deal in the future.


RE: Intel in retail?
By leexgx on 10/5/2008 8:41:06 AM , Rating: 2
Kingston do seem to charge higher prices then any one els (mostly in ram as thats i only ever looked at) but there sdram in the past allways worked when others did not

may end up that intel is setting the price on these SSD drives


RE: Intel in retail?
By PandaBear on 10/6/2008 4:08:07 PM , Rating: 2
Intel set the volume whole sale price, but it is up to Kingston to take it or leave it.

Usually the price trickle down from the fab or trickle up, or when a competitor or supplier comes into the field.

I'd imagine Intel won't be selling only to Kingston (may also sell to Seagate/WDC/etc), and Kingston won't be only selling Intel (most likely will be selling some Samsung or Toshiba SSD too).

The point is, large OEMs and retailers won't start using lots of SSD unless there are at least 3 to 4 suppliers that they can lowball on.


RE: Intel in retail?
By PandaBear on 10/6/2008 4:13:28 PM , Rating: 2
I'm not in the DRAM business, but from what I saw in our company's IT dept, the lazy asses want to have stuff that always works and pay a higher price for them. Since it is company's money and they will end up fixing compatibility issues if stuff doesn't work, they rather have someone that are proven if buying upgrade, either from OEM like DELL/HP (I know, stupid to buy the same RAM from DELL and pay 2x), or big brand like Crucial/Muskin/Corsair/Kingston. Too those lazy IT, nothing sells better than "tested, proven to work in brand ABC model XYZ" and they are willing to pay 100% more for them.


They are available
RE: They are available
By KITH on 10/3/2008 5:30:31 PM , Rating: 2
RE: They are available
By Ender17 on 10/4/2008 7:04:18 PM , Rating: 2
thanks so much for this info
they are on ebay too, but horrible title, you have to search with the model number you used: SSDSA2MH080G1C5
picked up one for $682.19 shipped minus $200 live.com cashback for a total of $482.19!
thanks again!


RE: They are available
By Nyceis on 10/4/2008 8:34:22 PM , Rating: 2
Great tip - just did this myself!


Can't Wait!
By gemsurf on 10/3/2008 1:41:37 PM , Rating: 2
I'm all over one of these as soon as they hit the market. Anyone heard when? I hate these paper launches.




RE: Can't Wait!
By Alpha4 on 10/3/2008 2:06:56 PM , Rating: 2
I hear ya. I'd rather not even know about new desktop components until they're at most a month away from mass production. After all, a chip in the hand is worth two in the fab.


RE: Can't Wait!
By icrf on 10/3/2008 9:11:14 PM , Rating: 2
Heard that.

This sounds like Dell will end up getting them, which means I can request one for my next desktop at work. Already planned on waiting on Nehalem before the request. Figure that and an Intel SSD, should be pretty good. If I'm really lucky, late this year, but hopefully by early next. Until then, I'll keep trucking along with my old Netburst 2.8 GHz Pentium-D.