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There has been a bustle of activity in recent months within the Solid State Drive market. OCZ led the way with the latest revision of Sandforce powered drives, followed by other manufacturers such as ADATA and Corsair.
Today we are looking at the new 240GB HyperX SSD drive from Kingston which is based around the leading mainstream Sandforce SF-2281 Controller.
We received the bundle version which includes:
- Acronis True Image HD Migration Software
- HyperX 2.5″ to 3.5″ Desktop Mounting Plate
- HyperX USB External Drive Bay
- HyperX Multi Head Screwdriver
- HyperX SATA Data Cable
The Kingston HyperX 240GB Packaging is very attractive, finished in a predominately black coloured box, with an angled shot of the drive on the front.
The box rates the drive speed statistics as 525 MB/s read and 480 MB/s write.
Inside, the drive is protected between foam, with the disc and accessories separated in another section underneath.
The bundle really is impressive, with a screwdriver, cables, software CD and mounting plate supplied in the package. Kingston also include an external chassis if you wish to use it externally. We like the Acronis True Image HD software, as you can connect the drive via USB and mirror the internal boot up drive, then replace.
The drive itself is styled in traditional Kingston colours, with blue accents at the edges. It is one of the more attractive looking SSD drives we have received in recent months. Inside is the PCB which is controlled by the Sandforce SF-2281 controller chip. Unfortunately it appears Kingston have sealed this drive with an unusual locking mechanism and I didn't want to break it by opening.
For testing, the drives are all wiped and reset to factory settings by HDDerase V4. We try to use free programs and some real world testing so you can compare our findings against your own system.
This is a good way to measure potential upgrade benefits.
CPU: Intel Core i7 2600k
Cooler: Thermaltake Frio OCK
Motherboard: Asus P8P67 Deluxe
Memory: ADATA DDR3 2000mhz 9-11-9-24
PSU: ADATA 1200W
Graphics: Sapphire HD6950 Flex Edition
Chassis: Thermaltake Level 10 GT
Operating System: Windows 7 64 bit Ultimate
Monitor: Dell U2410
Other Drives for comparisons:
OCZ Agility 3 240GB SSD
OCZ Vertex 3 240GB
OCZ Vertex 3 MAX IOPS 240GB
ADATA S511 240GB
Intel 510 120GB
Corsair F100 100GB
OCZ Vertex 2 120GB
Crucial Real SSD C300 64GB
Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB
Software:
Atto Disk Benchmark
HD Tach
CrystalMark
AS-SSD Benchmark
PCMark Vantage
PCMark 7
SiSoft Sandra
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call Of Pripyat
All our results were achieved by running each test five times with every configuration this ensures that any glitches are removed from the results. Trim is confirmed as running by typing fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify into the command line. A response of disabledeletenotify =0 confirms TRIM is active.
Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0 x64.
Next we wanted to try the alternative ‘compressible' setting called 0x00 fill.
We have included some other SSD tests from previous reviews, in the same system, to give an indication of overall performance.
By using the 0×00 0Fill setting, overall performance is significantly higher, scoring well over 505 MB/s with the read test and just over 496 MB/s in the write test. The overall 4K QD32 write performance is exceptional in this mode, scoring over 375 MB/s. The OCZ Vertex 3 MAX IOPS 240GB drive leads the way with the 4K QD32 read test.
I have been using HDTach for many years now and always find it is an invaluable benchmark to ascertain potential levels of performance. HD Tach is a low level hardware benchmark for random access read/write storage devices such as hard drives, removable drives (ZIP/JAZZ), flash devices, and RAID arrays. HD Tach uses custom device drivers and other low level Windows interfaces to bypass as many layers of software as possible and get as close to the physical performance of the device possible.
Not the best synthetic test for the latest SSD drives, but worth including as a point of interest. The Kingston drive takes third place, behind the ADATA S511 240GB and OCZ Vertex 3 240GB drives.
The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.
The results from the Kingston HyperX 240GB SSD drive are very impressive indeed. Below we will include some other SSD results from previous reviews, within the same system.
All the results between the leading drives are close, which is to be expected as they use the same controller (with company specific tweaks). The HyperX 240GB is tied in top position with the ADATA S511 240GB (2048.0 test).
We use Futuremark’s PCMark Vantage in many of our system reviews and we felt that it was worth an inclusion in this review. It is still a synthetic suite, but it uses many real world characteristics to try and judge overall performance levels. We are using the 64 bit version of the HDD Suite for this testing. We also compare against a Samsung F1 1TB drive on this page.
A PCMark score is a measure of your computer’s performance across a variety of common tasks such as viewing and editing photos, video, music and other media, gaming, communications, productivity and security. From desktops and laptops to workstations and gaming rigs, by comparing your PCMark Vantage score with other similar systems you can find the hardware and software bottlenecks that stop you getting more from your PC.
Superb results from the drive, outperforming everything we have reviewed to date in some of the tests.
PCMark 7 is the latest benchmark suite from Futuremark and it includes 7 separate test suites combining more than 20 individual workloads covering storage, computation, image and video manipulation, web browsing and gaming.
A very strong overall result for the Kingston HyperX 240GB SSD, giving results in line with the best SSD drives on the market today.
AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read and write tests, as well as random read and write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive. AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures.
We have included some results with other drives from previous reviews, tested on the same system configuration.
Very strong results from the Kingston HyperX 240GB drive, scoring over 508 MB/s in the sequential read test.
SiSoft Sandra is a benchmark tool that we use fairly regularly, it is a good all round synthetic software suite. Today we are obviously concentrating on the drive sections to ascertain the performance levels.
Again, class leading results from the Kingston HyperX 240GB drive, scoring 473MB/s and 499 MB/s in the file systems and Physical disks test.
It doesn’t matter how good any of the synthetic suites are, the real meat of the testing has to be under absolute real world conditions. This proves difficult as to record results we have to narrow down fluctuation. Therefore while we would say these are the most useful results to get from this review, there is always going to be a slight margin for error – its not absolutely scientific.
Firstly we installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit Edition onto each of the drives and performed a clean update from Microsoft with all patches and security fixes. We then install a basic suite of software, such as Office, Firefox and Adobe Design, then we install AVG free antivirus. We used a digital watch for this startup and repeated the test five times for each drive – once we had these five results we averaged the results and took that for the final figure.
The same speed as the other Sandforce 2281 powered drives, with a total time of 22 seconds.
The drive took 18 seconds to load the game, mirroring results over multiple runs. This is only a single second slower than the MAX IOPS drive, which scores 17 seconds.
If you are in the market for a new Solid State Drive today you are literally spoilt for choice. Any of the Sandforce 2281 powered drives are stellar products, delivering fantastic performance both with synthetic benchmarks, and more importantly in the real world.
The Kingston HyperX 240GB SSD uses the same Sandforce 2281 controller as many others, but manages to perform at the top of the pile, thanks to some smart ‘behind the scenes' tweaking.
The latest Sandforce drives really are in a class of their own and have no problems with any of the tests in our review suite. 4k performance in particular is exceptional, with this specific drive attaining one of the highest ever 4k QD32 write figures, at 375.5MB/s.
Right now drive availability is scarce, but it is due to hit stores within the next week. Overclockers have it listed for £409.99, which should include the same extensive accessories bundle as listed earlier in our review.
You certainly can't go wrong with any of the new Solid State Drives and there is no doubt that the Kingston HyperX 240GB is one of the best on the market today.
Pros:
- Performance is class leading.
- looks great.
- extensive bundle.
- software is useful.
Cons:
- 240GB drives are only for the wealthy audience.
Kitguru says: A first class entrance into the new market for Kingston.
