IDF 2009: The Best Tech From The Show Floor

Kingston Shows SSDNow Performance

Kingston had another strong presence at IDF this year and the
highlight of their booth for our audience was clearly the SSD Demo they
had setup. The had the recently released Intel DP55KG ‘Kingsberg’ motherboard paired with the Intel Core i7 870 ‘Lynnfield’ processor and 4GB of Kingston HyperX DDR3 2133MHz memory in the booth, but that wasn’t the impressive part. The system contained four Kingston SSDNow! M series drives and eight Kingston SSDNow! E series drives!

The full system specifications can be seen above and you’ll notice
that in case you were wondering the model numbers on some of the
drives.

A quick peak into Windows Device Manager is enough to make most people drool. The Adaptec RAID 5085 storage controller is $765.08 shipped and the Adaptec RAID 5445 storage controller is $742.37 shipped. If you factor in the eight Kingston SNE125-S2/32GB drives at $443.98 shipped each and four Kingston SNM125-S2/80GB at $279.98 shipped each, the grand total for just the SSDs and RAID controllers would be $6179.21!

We could leave it at that and let you gawk and the sexy looking
Danger Den Black Series 21 chassis, but what fun would that be? Here is
a quick video that we took (with bad audio due to all the people around
us) that shows just how fast the drives are in a cutting edge system.

In this demo Kingston shows off the speed of four Kingston SSDNow! E
series drives in a RAID 0 strip using an Adaptec RAID controller card
and opening 50 files spanning 5 applications in right around 15
seconds.

The other 8 drives in the system were to demo copying ~35GB of
data in about a minute from one RAID 0 array to another RAID 0 array.
The picture above shows the simple drag and drop test was speeding along at 465MB/s! Pretty interesting stuff and it is always interesting to see companies
like Kingston pushing the limits when it comes to storage practices!