Introduction & Specs

Introduction (Taken from the Kingston HyperX page)

"Budget-minded gamers and enthusiasts will benefit from the lower price of Kingston's new HyperX 3K SSD. This solid-state drive combines premium 3000 program-erase cycle NAND with the second-generation SandForce controller. Its lower price means more users can experience ultra-responsive gaming, multitasking and multimedia computing power. 3K loads games and applications faster, increases frames per second (FPS) for an improved gaming experience and allows for quick transfers and edits of large media files. HyperX 3K provides high-speed SATA Rev. 3.0 (6Gb/s) performance and blazing fast random and sequential read/write speeds."

My take on the subject

With SSD tech advancing at a colossal rate and more and more technical terms appearing every day to describe controller types, wear levellers and other such additions can make it hard to know what is what in the world of the Solid State Drive. Kingston have always been a big player in the memory market and have, for some time now, been applying there knowledge to making Solid State Drives. The market for good, reliable, fast SSDs is huge and full of competition from all the big names.

Can the Kingston HyperX 3K live up to its description as an enthusiast SSD, or have Kingston shot themselves in the foot giving this SSD an impossible task to live up to?

I could talk about NAND and iops for line after line but don’t run away just yet, I am going to try to keep this simple. So let us take a look at the specs before we move on.

Specifications

Get ready for this, this one is a doozie

Basic info

• Form factor - 2.5"
• Controller - SandForce® SF-2281
• Components - MLC NAND (3k P/E Cycles)
• Interface - SATA Rev 3.0 (6Gb/s), SATA Rev 2.0 (3Gb/s)
• Capacities - 90GB, 120GB, 240GB, 480GB
• Read - SATA Rev. 3.0 90GB / 120GB / 240GB – 555MB/s 480GB – 540MB/s
• Writes - SATA Rev. 3.0 90GB / 120GB / 240GB – 510MB/s 480GB – 450MB/s

Sustained random 4K R/W3

• 90GB – 20,000/50,000 IOPS
• 120GB – 20,000/60,000 IOPS
• 240GB – 40,000/57,000 IOPS
• 480GB – 60,000/45,000 IOPS

Max. random 4K R/W3

• 90GB –  85,000/74,000 IOPS
• 120GB – 85,000/73,000 IOPS
• 240GB – 86,000/60,000 IOPS
• 480GB – 75,000/48,000 IOPS

PCMARK® Vantage HDD Suite Score

• 90GB / 120GB / 240GB / 480GB:60,000

Supports

• SMART
• TRIM
• Garbage Collection

Power consumption

• 0.455 W (TYP) idle
• 1.58 W (TYP) read
• 2.11 W (TYP) write

Dimensions

• 69.85mm x 100mm x 9.5mm

Weight 97g

Operating temperatures 0°C ~ 70°C

Storage temperatures -40°C ~ 85°C

Shock resistance 1500G

Vibration operating 2.17G

Vibration non-operating 20G

MTBF 1,000,000 hrs

Total bytes written (TBW)

• 90GB:57.6TB
• 120GB:76.8TB
• 240GB:153.6TB
• 480GB:307.2TB

Quite the list of specifications and all impressive, but can the drive perform as per the stated specification

Next Page - First Impressions