Kingston, the largest maker of computer memory products, is selling a drive that stores 40 gigabytes of data in flash memory chips. The drive is going for less than $100 after promotions at some online stores.

Similar but smaller drives sell for about $120. Intel Corp. sells one that's nearly $400.

The move is part of Kingston's push for what are known as solid state drives, which, unlike traditional disk drives, have no moving parts.

"We want to drive awareness of solid state drives to a wider base," said Ariel Perez, Kingston's solid state drive business manager.

Solid state drives are seen as the biggest development in data storage in years. They use memory chips instead of spinning disks to store data. They're seen as faster and more reliable, and they use less power than disk drives.

Kingston is one of several players going after the market for solid state drives. Others include disk drive makers Seagate Technology LLC, Western Digital Corp., Hitachi Ltd. and Samsung Electronics Co.

Santa Ana's STEC Inc. has an early lead in solid state drives for servers and data storage computers used by corporations.

By lowering the price for its latest solid state drive, Kingston is trying to get around a problem that's slowed adoption -- the drives still are as much as five times more expensive than traditional disk drives.

"Part of Kingston's business model has always been to drive down costs," Perez said.

Kingston's main business is buying memory chips and assembling them as memory modules and cards for computers and consumer electronics. It has a quarter of the market for memory products with yearly sales of about $4 billion.

"With the size of the company, the buying power of this company is huge," Perez said. "That's one way we can bring prices a little lower."

Kingston is going after a targeted market with its latest drive. It's marketing it as a "boot drive" designed to make a computer start and shut down faster and speed up the use of some software.

Tech-savvy users could buy the drives to run operating systems, e-mail and other clunky programs, which would free up their computers' disk drives, according to Kingston. (continued...)

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