Back in 2008, around the time when everybody was starting to talk about the future of storage and the performance increases delivered by solid state drives, Santa Clara, California-based Intel debuted the X18-M and X25-M SSDs. The two products were designed to provide mainstream users with a choice for a high-performance storage solution, delivered in both 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch form factors.

The launch of Intel’s first mainstream storage solutions was received with enthusiasm by most, if not all hardware editors. And for good reason, as the X18-M and the X25-M delivered amazing performance, compared with most of the solutions available on the market at that point. However, there were some downsides to Intel’s new MLC-based SSDs, namely their pricing. As most SSDs on the market, Intel’s X18-M and the X25-M were not really that affordable to mainstream users, although that was one of the main points of attraction of this product lineup. Fortunately, since their launch, the price went a bit down and you can currently buy an 80GB X25-M SATA SSD for about $355.

After Intel launched its SSDs, the price of SSDs started to get more affordable, although those “affordable” solid state drives were not exactly that high on performance. Still, a select number of companies were keen on delivering products that provided users with both a high-performance product but also a good price tag. One such company is Kingston, which, early this year, decided to debut its own SSD offering, in collaboration with the Santa Clara, California-based leading chip maker.

For most people, the Kingston brand is associated with mainstream Flash memory products that are available in stock almost al the time. The company managed to make a name by offering good quality products that are affordable to most users and provide a good price per value ratio. Given the fact that its product lineup included everything from mainstream value DRAM to Flash-based storage, the decision to enter the SSD market was to be expected.

The launch took place at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada, where the company announced having started shipping its first two products as part of the SSDNow line of solid state drives, consequently announcing the debut of the new series of SSDs, titled SSDNow E Series and the SSD Now M Series. Each of the two series of SSDs were designed to provide users with a different level of performance, with the E series being targeted at the enterprise market, and the M-series being designed for mainstream performance and business users.

As you could probably remember, the launch of Kingston’s first SSD products was tightly related to the collaboration between the Flash memory company and the world’s leading chip maker, Intel. Both the enterprise E series and the business M series were designed on Intel’s own SSDs, which basically meant that Kingston would start selling Kingston-branded Intel SSDs. Consequently, this meant that the performance of the SSD Now series of SSDs was to be the same as that of Intel’s drives.

On that note, we recently had a chance to get our hands on one of these drives and put it through its pace. Granted that this was our first SSD review, we were anxious to find out first-hand what are the performance increases delivered by these Intel-based SSDs. So, without further ado, let us proceed with the technical specifications and the review itself.