Review: Kingston's new Hyper X SSD delivers blindingly quick SATA 6Gbps performance.
Kingston is now a veteran player in the SSD market, however its drives have historically been targeted at the budget end of the range. This has largely been down to the controller chips used, which have comes from companies like JMicron and Toshiba. While this has played well into Kingston’s budget strategy, the performance space has been beyond them.
Until now that is. Announced at Computex, the HyperX branded SSD is the first Kingston model to use a Sandforce controller. It is the same SF-2281 chip used by OCZ in its Vertex 3, and it brings Kingston firmly into the performance SSD space. A simple glance at street pricing confirms that this isn’t designed to replace the existing SSDNow line of products – at $289 for a 120GB model it’s a touch more costly than the OCZ, while the 240GB model comes in at $550, just below the OCZ one.
By employing the HyperX brand that has been so successful in the memory space Kingston has declared the SSD to be a performance part, and the results bear this out quite well. Sequential reads topped out at 505.33MB/s in AS-SSD and in the crucial 4K-64Thrd tests we saw a read speed of 213.57 MB/s and a write speed of 227.99 MB/s. These writes are a touch quicker than the Vertex 3, but we should point out that it also used more recent firmware than the review product from OCZ did.
These results highlight the general problem with the SSD market. Now that technologies like TRIM and Garbage collection are common and all the drives in the performance space are using the same controller, there is very little to differentiate between brands. Kingston has a few novelties up its sleeve, designed to make its drives stand out – namely an ‘upgrade kit’ that includes the usual 2.5 to 3.25in drive adapter but also a (disappointingly) USB 2.0 external case for the drive as well as a screwdriver and a copy of Acronis’ true image HD software for imaging your current drive.
It’s a nice package, but apart from the software we don’t really see it getting much use. The real value is in the performance of the drive, which is fantastic.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012