Huawei breaks into the consumer SSD market with the eKitStore Xtreme 200E at a surprisingly low price

Huawei has started selling eKitStore Xtreme 200E PCIe 4.0 consumer NVMe solid-state drives in South Korea. The 1 TB drive model is currently offered for only $32 at current exchange rates – this is significantly cheaper than similar solutions offered by competitors.

Huawei has been producing server-grade SSDs for a long time. However, the company entered the consumer SSD market only in June of this year, announcing the eKitStore Xtreme 200E series of drives. It includes models ranging from 512 GB to 4 TB, offering sequential read speeds of up to 7400 MB/s and sequential write speeds of up to 6700 MB/s, making them one of the fastest solutions on the market in this segment. Of course, this is much slower than flagship solutions with PCIe 5.0, but in their segment these SSDs look very interesting.

The new product does not use DRAM buffer memory. The manufacturer does not specify which controller is used in eKitStore Xtreme 200E drives. We only know that it complies with NVMe 2.0 specifications. It is also reported that the SSD is equipped with NAND QLC flash memory.

Nothing is known about the controller and memory manufacturers either. The Tom’s Hardware portal suggests that the developer of the controller may be the Chinese company MaxioTech. Its solutions are often used in inexpensive SSDs. It is also possible that the eKitStore Xtreme 200E controller is Huawei’s own design. As for flash memory chips, their supplier may be the Chinese manufacturer YMTC.

The eKitStore Xtreme 200E SSD model costs 47,500 South Korean won, or about $32. With such a price tag and declared performance, the new product looks much more attractive than all competitive solutions of the same volume. At the moment, it is unclear whether the company plans to sell SSDs at this price permanently or whether this is a holiday promotion or a temporary discount.