New Name Discovered in SSD: KingSpec, in China

Shenzhen KingSpec Electronics Technology Co., Ltd., founded in 2005, designs, manufactures and sells flash storage devices like USB flash keys, memory card and SSDs.

Its ISO-certified factory in Nanshan, Shenzhen, China, occupied 15,000 square meters with 1,200 staff members, 16 SMT and automatic production equipments. Flash-related storage devices production capability reaches three million pieces per month, according to the company.

KingSpec entered into SSDs three years ago with its own R&D starting 1.8-inch IDE units for laptops, then industrial devices and mSATA products with SandForce controllers. It is now offering 1.8/2.5/3.5-inch SSDs with PATA/SATA interfaces, and other devices with mSATA, ZIF (40-pin) and CF (50-pin) connectors.

Its recently announced 3Gb SATA Spark series achieving up to 300MB/s, and around 30,000 IO/s with the DuraWrite controller.

At Computex 2012 it uncovered the KingSpec PCIe Mutticore Series SSD, a prototype housing eight mSATA SSDs with LSI/SandForce controllers that can be configured with 64GB to 2TB of synchronous NAND flash memory in RAID-0.

kingspec_pcie_ssd_accelerating_card

The firm also introduced the Challenger Series SATA 3 SSD in 7mm and 9mm
form factors, available in capacities of 120GB, 240GB and 480GB using
LSI/SandForce SF-2281 processor and listed at 500MB/s read and 450MB/s.
The 120GB unit is expected to retail at approximately $100 and the 240GB
at $230.

Reseller prices are really aggressive. Look at that: the 6Gb SATA 2.5-inch MLC (async.) unit costs only $89 for 120GB and $366 for 480GB. mSATA are priced from $13 for 8GB up to $58 for 64GB.

Other known Chinese SSD manufacturers: