Kingston & OCZ Show Off NVMe-based PCIe SSDs At IDF

It’s not often that a brand-new or updated protocol feels deprecated right out-of-the-gate. Take a look at Thunderbolt; it seems to deliver outstanding speeds that we can’t even catch up to with our devices. And then there’s SATA 3, a protocol that became a bottleneck for super-fast SSDs not long after it hit our motherboards.

Thankfully, SATA isn’t our only option, as PCIe can do a lot more than feed audio, video, and networking to our system. Next year, the market should be littered with NVMe SSDs, which are much faster than the AHCI-driven PCIe solutions we’ve seen. To give us a taste of what’s to come, both Kingston and OCZ have shown off their goods at IDF.

Let’s start with OCZ’s solution, as no performance teases accompanied it. This drive is called the RevoDrive 400 and will be available in up to 960GB densities. No release date was given, but we could see it before the end of the year.

Kingston’s solution is similar, and based on its HyperX Predator drive released earlier this year. A 480GB prototype was on display, and again the top density will likely be 960GB.

So what about performance? Well, taking into account that the original HyperX Predator hits about 115,000 IOPS, the fact that the upcoming NVMe version hits ~236,000 is nothing short of incredible.

Kingston notes that this is just a prototype, meaning that performance could get even better before launch. However, it could also mean that performance could decrease, all in the name of stability. At this point, we’ll just have to wait and see.

What we do know for sure is that NVMe is going to enable consumers to have access to the kind of speed that has only been available to enterprise customers. Even though these speeds are going to be overkill for most people, that is exciting.