Kingston Technology Co. has teamed up with Intel Corp. to market flash memory-based drives to top makers of laptops and servers. The pact with chipmaker Intel is a shift for Fountain Valley-based Kingston, the leading maker of memory modules for computers.

Kingston traditionally has taken a “wait and see” approach to new products. It waited years to get into flash memory cards for consumer electronics, which now construct up a quarter of Kingston’s $4.5 billion in yearly sales.

The flash drive effort “almost flies in the face of the usual Kingston model,” spokesman David Leong said. “This is one market where we believe it will grow quite a bit. The opportunity was there to jump into it right now with Intel.”

The move puts Kingston in an emerging market. Drives made of memory chips are starting to grab business from traditional disk drives, but they’re still in their infancy.

Kingston plans to resell drives made by Intel, which makes

flash memory chips. Kingston is set to supply technical support, examining and sell the drives to the likes of Hewlett-Packard Co., Dell Inc., IBM Corp. and others.

Intel makes two flash drive models-one that goes into business laptops and another for servers on corporate networks.

The drives are set to ship in the fourth quarter, Leong said.

Kingston has a distant history with Intel.

“We have had both an engineering and marketing relationship with Intel for more than a decade,” Leong said. “We work together considering we are all part of the same ecosystem.”

Kingston’s main business is buying memory chips and assembling them onto circuit boards that boost the performance of computers. It additionally makes memory cards that store photos, songs and info on consumer electronics.

A few years ago, Kingston worked with Intel on a memory module designed to amp up the reliability, speed and density of memory chips…

Orginal post by Mike