Kingston HyperX 240GB SATA 6Gbit/s SSD Review

[PAGETITLE=Introduction][Top Ad] It is with great pleasure that we are now reviewing the Kingston HyperX SSD. Kingston has for several years offered one of the most expansive lineups in SSDs by utilizing controllers from almost every manufacturer - with one sole, notable exception: SandForce. The HyperX branding is Kingston's enthusiast grade memory brand, but it now also signifies Kingston's enthusiast SSD offering. In the past we have generally found Kingston's SSDs to be quite favorable, in particular the value-friendly offerings that utilized Toshiba controllers, so it is great to see the company now stepping in to the enthusiast market. More competition in the SSD market from a reputable technology company is always a good thing. When it comes to SSDs, SandForce literally has become a household name and it isn't hard to see why. While the first generation of SF-1200 drives delivered very good performance, the second generation SF-2200 controller simply dominates the market with read performance capable of exceeding 500MB/s in some usage scenarios, with writes and heavy I/O equally well-covered. The HyperX is Kingston's first SSD to utilize a SandForce controller, and as one might expect it is the SF-2281. It's never a good idea to judge an SSD by its cover, but in this case the HyperX is already shaping up to be a nice SSD. It's a welcome departure from the usual matte gray or black plastic housings found on other drives, but it goes beyond just the aesthetics. Out of the dozens of SSDs we have handled this one actually has heft; it feels solid. We'll mention why further down. Unlike a very well-known competitor we could mention, there isn't any cheap-form plastic not fully seated to the housing to be found. Kingston HyperX SSD Seq. Reads Seq. Writes Sustained Random Read (IOPS) Sustained Random Write (IOPS) Peak Random Reads (IOPS) Peak Random Writes (IOPS) 120GB 555MB/s 510 MB/s 20,000 60,000 95,000 70,000 240GB 555 MB/s 510 MB/s 40,000 60,000 95,000 60,000 There has been a wave of new SandForce-powered SSDs over the past few weeks, and ordinarily while any SandForce controller is like any other, the NAND they are paired with is another matter entirely and does affect performance. To keep things simple and straight-forward when attempting to compare SSDs to one another, SandForce SSDs typically can be split into one of these three categories: Value, Performance, and Extreme. Value SF-2281 drives will use lower cost (and slightly lower performing) asynchronous NAND, while Performance drives will go with synchronous NAND. Extreme variants will utilize a Toggle-based NAND setup to eke out every edge in performance, but will be priced accordingly. To date I'm only aware of three "Extreme" models that exist (Vertex 3 Max IOPS, Patriot WildFire), so obviously most SF-2281 drives will fall into either the Value or Performance label. All of that said, the Kingston HyperX 240GB SSD we are reviewing fits squarely in the Performance category. Under the hood it is packing 25nm IMFT synchronous NAND (correction: it's in fact Intel 25nm Compute NAND) mounted on a custom PCB design. However, that is not all. Out of all the SSD's we have seen Kingston is the first and only company to include thermal pads in its HyperX SSDs. Although they are not required, it is great to see a company taking extra care in the design of its products. (Of course, attempting to open the drive invalidates the warranty, and in this case, also requires a special hollow/security hex driver). Kingston offers a full three year warranty on the HyperX SSD family. Kingston includes quite a few extras in the upgrade bundle kit. There is a single-piece 2.5"-3.5" bay adapter, a USB 2.0 enclosure for converting any SSD into a mobile flash drive of sorts (included mostly for the sake of transferring your OS to the SSD), SATA & USB cables, screws, and lastly an aluminum screwdriver "pen" with changeable magnetic tips. Also on the CD (not pictured) is a copy of Acronis' migration software. Given the SSD in question this is bundled with we would like to see a USB 3.0 capable enclosure. Also we would prefer that the SATA cable was actually rated for SATA 6Gbps and was of the latching variety. Overall the package includes some good extras, but these changes would make the upgrade kit significantly better and more appropriate given the extreme performance the Kingston HyperX SSDs can deliver. [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=Test System & Methodology] At Techgage, we strive to make sure our results are as accurate and real-world applicable as possible. We list most of the steps and processes involved in setting up and conducting our benchmarking process below, but in the interests of brevity we can't mention every last detail. If there is any pertinent information that we've inadvertently omitted or you have any thoughts, suggestions, or critiques, then please feel free to email us or post directly in our forums. This site exists for readers like you and we value your input. The table below lists the hardware used in our current storage-testing machine, which remains unchanged throughout all of our testing, with the obvious exception of the storage device. Each drive used for the sake of comparison is also listed here. Component Techgage Solid-State Drive Test System Processor Intel Core i7-2600 - 3.50GHz (Locked) Quad-Core Motherboard ASUS P8P67 Deluxe Memory 4GB Kingston DDR3-1866 Graphics AMD Radeon HD 5770 Audio On-Board Audio Storage Hitachi 7200RPM 2TB Hard Drive Corsair Force F90 90GB Kingston V+ Series 128GB Kingston HyperX 240GB OCZ Vertex Turbo 120GB OCZ Vertex 2 120GB OCZ Vertex 3 240GB OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS 240GB Power Supply Antec NeoHE 550W Cooling Noctua DH-14 Et cetera Lite-on DVD-RW Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 64-bit Our Windows 7 Desktop for SSD Testing When preparing our SSD testbed for benchmarking we follow these guidelines: General Guidelines The Core i7-2600 processor is turbo-locked at 3.5GHz for result consistency. No power-saving options are enabled in the motherboard's EFI. AHCI is enabled in the motherboard's EFI for best performance. Only the Intel 6Gb/s port controller is used for test drives. Only cold boots are utilized; for the purposes of our testing a boot is defined as the moment the power button is depressed to the moment the last systray icon and program has fully loaded after reaching the Windows 7 desktop. Auto-login is enabled. Windows 7 Optimizations User Account Control (UAC) is disabled. The OS is kept clean; no scrap files are left in between runs. Windows Update and OS power-saving settings are disabled. For our new Sandy Bridge storage testbed we have migrated to using test images for our drives. All drives are imaged with the cloned test image to ensure all drivers, programs, and settings remain identical for testing purposes. We feel disk cloning software and SSD controller technology has matured to the point where potential issues such as non-aligned sectors are no longer a potential issue. For testing, we run all tests five times dropping the highest and lowest results, then take the average of the middle three. And who said that college statistics class wouldn't prove useful? If any anomalous results are seen the test will be run again. Given the complexities of modern computers, and especially today's operating systems and the software that runs on them, we feel this provides the most accurate results possible. Finally, we are seeking to constantly improve and expand upon our SSD testing methodology. We are always actively seeking real-world workload scenarios that are bottlenecked by hard drives, so if you have any suggestions whatsoever or there is a program you would like to see included in our SSD content, then please drop by our forums and let us know! We are always looking to expand our SSD benchmarks and provide more useful and real-world results, and not just synthetic numbers. [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=Synthetic: PCMark 7] Futuremark's PCMark benchmarking suite should need no introduction as it has been a staple of PC benchmarks for the better half of a decade. PCMark offers a range of tests to gauge every aspect of a computer's performance and presents it in a neat simple final result. Thankfully it also breaks down the overall score with individual subsystem scores (such as Memory, Storage, etc) in addition to given individual test results. With the latest 2011 release of PCMark 7 we should hopefully see quite a few changes to how SSDs are handled, and the resulting scores computed, as previously, results were biased towards sequential read and write performance. With its Windows 7 focus PCMark 7 offers a variety of storage system tests, such as simulating a Windows Defender scan and using Windows Media Center to using other built-in programs for video and music file manipulation. But for those that just want a nice overarching score, it has those too. PCMark 7 is a welcome refresh of the well-known PCMark series and brings with it optimizations to better handle SSDs when computing scores. This results in a much flatter spread of SSDs in both the overarching score and the final storage system score. Right off the bat the Kingston HyperX is making waves as it delivers performance above even the V3 Max IOPS. We will have to attribute at least some of such strong results to updates in SandForce firmware that have been made since our V3 review, but regardless of why this is top-notch performance from the HyperX. [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=Synthetic: Iometer & AS SSD] Originally developed by Intel, and since given to the open-source community, Iometer (pronounced "eyeawmeter", like thermometer) is one of the best storage-testing applications available, for a couple of reasons. The first, and primary, is that it's completely customizable, and if you have a specific workload you need to hit a drive with, you can easily accomplish it here. Also, the program delivers results in IOPS (input/output operations per second), a...

Kingston HyperX 240GB SATA 6Gbit/s SSD Review

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