The Kingston SSD interview: PCIe 5.0, DirectStorage and more

It’s an exciting time in the PC hardware space. While we’ve been spending our time testing DDR5 memory and 12th-gen Intel processors, we’re also on the cusp of some interesting storage innovations. Microsoft’s DirectStorage API was released just a few weeks prior, and as PCIe 4.0 SSDs have become increasingly affordable, PCIe 5.0 has debuted on Intel motherboards, soon to be replicated with AMD’s next generation platform. With that in mind, we had plenty of questions ready when we were approached by storage giant Kingston to speak to one of their longest-serving executives on the SSD side of the firm.

What follows is an interview with Tony Hollingsbee, EMEA Business Manager – SSD at Kingston. He’s been at the company for two decades, and therefore had a hand in the transition from hard drives to SATA and then NVMe SSDs. We asked him about what the next big storage technologies would mean for gamers, whether Kingston would be up for creating SSDs for the Xbox, not just the PlayStation 5 and PC, and what kind of testing drive manufacturers do when preparing their latest products for the public – and reviewers – to test out. Enjoy!

Having been at Kingston for 20 years, you must have overseen the switch from HDD to SSD as the storage tech of choice, and again from SATA to NVMe SSDs. Can you speak to what those transitions were like from your perspective?

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