The hottest thing in the SSD universe right now is PCIe-based drives, either those that plug right into a PCIe slot, or an M.2 slot. At CES, we learned that Kingston would be dipping its toes into such waters, with its HyperX Predator. What we knew of the drive at that time sounded good, but since then, something interesting happened: It became even better than what we expected.
For starters, the HyperX Predator is an x4 part, meaning that its bandwidth is much-improved. To put that to numbers, Kingston says that its drive will peak at 1,400MB/s read and up to 1,000MB/s write (for the 480GB model). On the IOPS front, we can expect random performance of up to 160,000 for read, and 119,000 for write. Under-the-hood (well, it’s not quite “under”…) is Marvell’s 88SS9293 controller.
This is a little verbose, but since Kingston crunched the numbers, I feel compelled to share them:
Compressible Data Transfer (ATTO)
- 240GB: 1400MB/s Read and 600MB/s Write
- 480GB: 1400MB/s Read and 1000MB/s Write
Incompressible Data Transfer (AS-SSD and CrystalDiskMark)
- 240GB: 1290MB/s Read and 600MB/s Write
- 480GB: 1100MB/s Read and 910MB/s Write
IOMETER Maximum Random 4k Read/Write
- 240GB: up to 160,000/ up to 119,000 IOPS
- 480GB: up to 130,000/ up to 118,000 IOPS
Random 4k Read/Write
- 240GB: up to 120,000/ up to 78,000 IOPS
- 480GB: up to 117,000/ up to 70,000 IOPS
PCMARK Vantage HDD Suite Score
- 240GB: 138,000
- 480GB: 139,000
PCMARK 8 Storage Bandwidth
- 240GB: 331MB/s
- 480GB: 336MB/s
PCMARK 8 Storage Score
- 240GB: 5,015
- 480GB: 5,017
Anvil Total Score (Incompressible Workload)
- 240GB: 6,500
- 480GB: 6,700
Kingston is going to be selling its HyperX Predator in both 240GB and 480GB sizes, with each being available in either the straight M.2 drive or preinstalled into a half-height half-length PCIe card (seen above). Street pricing for the stand-alone drives are $230.74 for the 240GB and $458.74 for the 480GB. You can expect the PCIe card inclusion to add $11-ish to that.
Remember when SATA SSDs were the best thing ever? Now it’s hard to even get that excited about them, seeing as M.2 SSDs are proving to be up to 3x faster!
You can expect the HyperX Predator to hit e-tail imminently.