Kingston was present at CES 2019 with the SSD A2000 in NVME format, which they developed with a specific goal in mind: lower costs than SATA drives.
Kingston Introduces NVMe A2000 SSD Memory with 4x PCIe Connection
A2000Until now, it has been impossible to focus exclusively on SSD NVMe storage drives because the cost of NVMe controllers has increased compared to their SATA counterparts, but this is the trend in every technology, prices are dropping after the first launch of a product.
Some NVMe solutions have used controllers that only support PCIe x2 buses, but not the A2000, which uses full 4x PCIe ports and is available with capacities of 240GB, 480GB or 960GB.
Kingston wants cheaper NVMe SSDs
The A2000 series will use different controllers, meaning that Kingston will purchase from more than one manufacturer (Silicon Motion’s SM2263 series and Phison’s low-cost controllers). Although this could lead to performance differences, Kingston says they will ensure that experience and performance between the two variants are consistent, and that the only reason for this is to lower the total unit cost to achieve a product line below the cost of a SATA drive.
NVMe drives typically require less material than SATA drives and are not limited in bandwidth. This could mean that NVMe drives are equipped with similar or lower cost than SATA drives, which is the biggest obstacle to putting on them so far, and the motherboard requires a special M.2 interface.
The new A2000 series will offer sequential read speeds of up to 2000MB/s and sequential write speeds of up to 1500MB/s. The new A2000 series will be available in a wide range of sizes and sizes.