Kingston Crowns Its First Enterprise Class Solid State Drive, SSDNow E100

Holy shitballs that's a lot of write cycles. Kudos to Kingston for that.

Pricing will give us an indication of the value here, but given that there was a $70 difference between the HyperX 3k and HyperX drives, and the only difference was 2k more write cycles.. I can see this being quite pricey.

Price will be interesting to see but that is impressive performance and the jump in write cycles is a pretty huge leap.

What does it take to be part of the "enterprise-class?"

Enterprise class may contain faster memory, different types of memory, are meant to operate 24/7, have higher quality (or should) components and are meant for mission critical applications. In theory they should perform better and operate longer without failure. This is how IBM defines enterprise class on their site: Enterprise server and storage users would likewise never consider a 5400 RPM mobile SATA HDD for use in a performance oriented, business critical application in the data center. Even though a mobile SATA HDD reads, writes and stores data the same way as any other 15K RPM drive, it doesn’t meet the enterprise’s needs. This same reasoning can be applied to using a low cost, consumer SATA SSD in these same mission critical applications. Even low cost SATA SSDs are faster than HDDs. But they are not as capable as a true enterprise class SSD. They store data the same way as the other SAS or FC SSDs, so why not use it and save some money…? The answers are the same as HDD considerations. Data centers don’t use the 5400 RPM mobile drives for several critical reasons; trust, reliability, life expectancy, data retention, redundancy and performance. Under the same considerations, consumer-grade SATA SSDs designed for consumer applications lack the critical ‘designed for enterprise’ capabilities that are necessary for today’s data centers. Key to these designed for enterprise features include dual porting, end-to-end data integrity inside the drive to protect data on the fly, rigorous specification and testing of all components, interface compatibility and technologies that work in the enterprise systems (rather than having to adapt the enterprise infrastructure to support the drive).

Joma nailed it on the head, it has to be faster more reliable and more secure than a regular SSD to be an enterprise model. The distinction to me has always been pretty simple, i liken them to star wars. You can have a thousand clone warriors (cheap drives) and they will all die before a small green jedi with a light saber (incredibly super strong and long lasting SSD's)

granted its a little bit overly nerdy and fantasy like but hey a kid can dream.

I actually own the hyperX 3K SSD, its great for me. I bought it because of the cheaper price and the reliability.

I can only imagine what a drive thats 400GB with all those write cycles is gonna cost... CHA-CHING!

Whoa a 400GB SSD!

Woot ! 400GB

The days where SSD truely replaces HDDs are coming

Pricing is awful though

Have been waiting for a long time to try SSDs

535MB/s read and 500MB/s write ?

great !

This is a sweet little drive. Would love to get one for an upgrade. Reading the 30,0000 program/erase.cycles made my nipples hard.

This is a sweet little drive. Would love to get one for an upgrade. Reading the 30,0000 program/erase cycles made my nipples hard.

Its all about the price now. But if you are an enthusiast no matter what the price youll save up for it. Top ramen for a few months wont hurt lol

400GB Wow this is awesome! Kingston Rules!