Kingston teams up with Intel to supply SSD drives

Memory maker Kingston has joined up with chipmaker Intel to produce flash-memory based drives for popular-brand notebooks and servers, according to a Thursday report. Traditionally, Kingston has made flash memory cards for consumer electronics devices such as digital cameras, which make up a quarter of the company’s business. Under the deal with Intel, Kingston will resell drives made by Intel, providing technical support and testing to buyers at Dell, HP and IBM, among others.

Flash, or solid state drives (SSD), are becoming more common in today’s computers, and especially notebooks, thanks to their superior shock resistance, faster speeds, and lower power consumption compared to traditional rotating hard disk drives (HDDs).

The Kingston-branded drives will begin shipping before the end of 2008, and will include products made for use in business notebooks and corporate network servers. It is not known if Kingston will eventually sell SSD drives directly to consumers, though Intel has promoted its own drives as replacements for home users.

Filed under: computers, industry
Other story tags: Intel, Dell, IBM, Kingston