Kingston's move into the SandForce SSD market is great news for the consumer. With its new HyperX branded solid state drives in hand, we take a look at these amazingly fast SSDs and examine if an SSD from Kingston should be on your short list for your next storage purchase.

Kingston Technology has offered solid state drive products for several years now. The company started off strong with an Intel X-25 series drive that equaled the highest levels of performance available at the time. Since then Kingston has focused on mainstream products based on controllers from JMicron and Toshiba. These products featured low read access times but fell short on sequential transfer performance and write IOPS when compared to leading enthusiast products shipping from other manufacturers.

Mainstream SSDs have a place in the market but should cost less than "flagship" SSDs. Unfortunately this was a problem with many of Kingston’s solid state drive offerings; the performance was mainstream but the price wasn’t.