SK Hynix to release consumer SSDs under its own name

Korean memory manufacturer SK Hynix has announced the Gold S31. The company is thus entering the consumer SSD market after years of absence. The SSDs will appear in Europe next year.

The Gold S31 is the first product in Hynix’s new SuperCore family of consumer SSDs. The name S31 refers to sata three, first generation. The SSD is therefore a 2.5″ SSD with a SATA interface. The controller was developed by SK Hynix itself and the company does not provide further details about this. It is also not known which generation of nand memory the company uses.

Hynix does report that the maximum sequential read and write speeds are respectively 560MB/s and 525MB/s and that the Gold S31 products will be available in storage capacities of 250GB, 500GB and 1TB. That will initially only be the case at Amazon in the US and the 250GB version will cost $50 there, while the 500GB SSD will cost $78 and the 1TB drive will cost $124. An availability in Europe should follow in 2020 and a PCI-e version is also on the way, according to the manufacturer.

SK Hynix had the Canvas series of SSDs for consumers a few years ago, but these never appeared in Europe and the company stepped out of that market. The company has continued to supply SSDs under its own name for the enterprise and OEM markets. Competitors in the memory market such as Samsung and Intel have served the consumer market with their own SSDs all along.