Fountain Valley-based Kingston Technology Co., the top maker of memory for PCs and consumer devices, is set to start selling flash memory-based drives.
The company is set to make what’s called solid state drives and market them to consumers as accessories for notebook PCs, according to a report Monday from storage technology news Web site blocksandfiles.com.
Industry insiders refer to flash memory-based drives as solid state because they have no moving parts. They typically are smaller, use less power and are more durable.
Traditional drives have spinning disks called platters, a needle-like reader and other chips and connecting parts.
Almost all PC makers now offer a solid state drive option on their computers, including Lenovo Group Ltd., Dell Inc., Toshiba Corp., Samsung Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., Sony Corp. and others.
Kingston is looking to sell the flash drives as an alternative to upgrading, augmenting or replacing standard disk drives, according to the report.
Users currently upgrade traditional drives by unscrewing several screws in notebooks or computers and they can apply the same technique to upgrade to solid state drive storage, according to Bernd Dombrowsky, Kingston sales director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Kingston’s Brandon Stevens, senior technology manager for flash at Kingston, told the Business Journal earlier this year that it was eyeing flash drives.
Executives weren’t available for comment Monday.
Kingston already buys flash to make memory cards that go into computers, cameras and cell phones, but it doesn’t make solid state drives.
Industry watchers fall into two camps: Some say flash drives are set to replace traditional hard drives altogether, while others think there will be room for both.
For now, consumer acceptance of flash drives has been slow.
The high cost of flash,the building blocks for the drives,are too prohibitive for mainstream PC users to bite.
The company typically doesn’t enter a market until it’s a proven money-maker.
“Kingston does best at a product when it starts to reach the mainstream,” Stevens said.
The move further pits Kingston against other makers of flash drives, including Milpitas-based SanDisk Corp., the biggest maker of flash memory devices.
Kingston is now an indirect competitor of Santa Ana’s STEC Inc., which makes flash-based drives that go into big servers used by the military and for industrial applications.
Other big consumer names have gotten into the action, including Intel Corp., Samsung Corp., Micron Technology Inc. and Seagate Technology LLC.
Kingston has said that flash memory is its fastest-growing source of sales.
It saw roughly $1 billion of its $4.5 billion in revenue last year come from flash. The bulk of its sales come from selling circuit boards loaded with memory chips to the world’s biggest PC makers.
