Kingston's Ghost Tree is a surprisingly cool name for a next-gen 7,000MB/s SSD

Kingston Ghost Tree — (Image credit: Kingston)

Kingston has announced that it has a next-gen PCIe 4.0 SSD on the way. Not only that, but it has a surprisingly cool codename as well, Ghost Tree. Mysterious. SSDs aren't usually the type of thing to get cool codenames, but maybe their improving position in the world is behind the shift.

It isn't just a cool name, of course, it also looks to be on the money when it comes to performance. Kingston hasn't released a lot of information about the new drives just yet, other than it's targeting peak sequential read and write speeds of 7,000MB/s.

That sounds suspiciously as though it's going to use the Phison E18 controller, which can be found powering the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus, which I've got in the lab right now, and manages to produce sequential read speeds of 7,006MB/s and 6,833MB/s writes in CrystalDiskMark 7. Spoilers: it's even faster than the Samsung 980 Pro in plenty of tests.

Back to Kingston a second, we don't have any confirmation on when 'Ghost Tree' will sprout into our machines, although Kingston has said that the drives are intended for 'content creators and power users', which makes us think that these aren't going to be on the budget end of the pricing spectrum.

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Kingston has also said that it is releasing with capacities from 1TB to 4TB, which should give its target market plenty of room to play with. We gamers wouldn't mind one of the more capacious options as well, because our steam libraries aren't not getting any smaller.

For more affordable drives, Kingston has its NV Series of NVMe drives, which stick with the PCIe 3.0 interface and offer capacities up to 2TB. It has also announced the XS2000, an external USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 drive that can be bought in capacities from 500GB to 2TB. It's a speedy external drive too, with transfer rates up to 2,000MB/s.

Alan has been writing about PC tech since before 3D graphics cards existed, and still vividly recalls having to fight with MS-DOS just to get games to load. He fondly remembers the killer combo of a Matrox Millenium and 3dfx Voodoo, and seeing Lara Croft in 3D for the first time. He's very glad hardware has advanced as much as it has though, and is particularly happy when putting the latest M.2 NVMe SSDs, AMD processors, and laptops through their paces. He has a long-lasting Magic: The Gathering obsession but limits this to MTG Arena these days.