Kingston have emblazoned their Hyper X branding upon a new line of SATAIII SSDs. Do they live up to the name?



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I don't know.. you tell us

Edit: ok now the link is up lol

They look cool at least

Performance wise it's very similar to other 240GB 2nd gen SandForce drives: Stockingly quick!!

£400

Worth it you can afford it though.

It's worth £400 and then some.. Those low down ATTO speeds are incredible.

That's usually where drives falter, but that one just chewed up all file sizes and spat them out like there's no tomorrow

Ouch that's quick! £400 for a 240GB is plausable at these speeds. Especially when you realise what storage you actually need at hyper speed, with a large mechanical in the background for the lumpy stuff. SSD's seem to have come of age

The 256's we reviewed not so long ago retailed at £600 ..... so £400 for those speeds is pretty epic!

i'm in lurve with this SSD

I agree. Good speed for a good price.

Bryan, you gonna be doing a few more reviews of the latest SSD ranges? It would be good for comparison.

There will be more, this is just the first we have got our hands on. Probs do most brands except OCZ

I laughed

You can't mock it on the speed. £400, which is around £1.67 per gig I still have issues with. (I still don't like £1.33 or so, but still) Comparing it with something that's stupidly @ £2.34 just doesn't cut it for me.

I do wonder how fast these will become before anyone 'really' notices any difference irl. Benches are artificial as we learn with gaming performance benchmarks. The numbers are unarguably fantastic.

The average person saves... how big a file usually ? Copying hooky files and movies, granted the 1 minute on one SSD turns into 50 seconds on this SSD - but even then how often do most people do that ? Not only that, if you do that alot, even 240/256g isn't enough, so you're limited to you 90mbs 1TB regular drive speed.

Boot times.. your current 'mediocre' SSD boots you in 15 seconds, this one does it in 10 seconds..

I dunno, if you have the cash in abundance - splash it - there is no question what-so-ever. They do what they say on the tin at what I'd still call an alarming price, but you have it.

... just don't lemme see rig listings on here with this drive included and a freakin GTX460 as the graphics card !

How about OEM versions of these things, just IT in a box - and naff all branding ? Cos branding really is bllx. You stick these things in a rig where no-one will generally seem them. I suppose it's do-able, but it'd probably even then go down to £1.33/g.. £320 or so.. But the thing with tat is they include it to make you feel better about the package you've outlayed a lot of cash on.

There is the SSD only and the "upgrade kit" in the upgrade version there is a CD, what is it for?

As mentioned in the review the CD contains Acronis backup software to allow you to migrate from your current drive to this one without losing any data.

Thanks, must have missed it

Rasta. I think like most products it's a great buy if you are looking to get one now, or, for other reasons (size upgrade, new build ETC).

Of course, the thing is horrifically fast but it's not really a good idea to ditch the one you have already if it's slower but the same size.

It's kinda like selling your 480 at a huge loss to rush out and buy a 580.

And I'm glad we are going to remain OCZ free tbh.

And bloody good that is too. Been my lifeline for about two years now !

Does this also work from hdd to ssd?

Wow amazing speeds and looks, one of the few SSDs that I would want to mount near a case window for people to see.

Also I know you've had bad experiences with OCZ before Tom, but they appear to be the most popular brand of SSD atm, although considering what you said about their Vertex 2, they probably wouldn't want to lend you one .

Yes..No... but...

In the instance that I did it TRIM did not work properly. I tried enabling it by upgrading the controller or something, but even though disabledeletenotify came back with a 0 it clearly wasn't working.

Now that could be just me, but I seem to recall some one else having the same problem. I also needed to completely reinstall when flashing on the TRIM firmware (well, it was around the same time.. Basically I flashed on the firmware, TRIM didn't work so I imaged and it still didn't work).

I's guess from one SSD to another though it should be fine

Tom's opinion is well founded mate tbh. There has been two instances of OCZ issues this week alone on here. They are popular because they are usually cheap. However, they are taken to the slaughter house before being hung drawn and quartered by Crucial's drives.

well now .....im thoroughly impressed.....well done Kingston....well done oc3d!!!

I play ArmA:2 and that is a game that really benefits from a fast SSD The Maps and game data is around 8Gb and this has to stream from the hard drive to RAM in relatively small chunks. Due to restrictions in the game engine it never occupies more than about 2Gb or system RAM. Quite a few ArmA players have SSD's and could be said to be a group of early adopters. something like this SSD is well high on my list of things to have. A higher priority than a new G/Card. save save save....

I will deffo get the 120gb version

When are SSD's going to start coming down in price to a reasonable price> I seriously want to upgrade all my HDD's to SDD' but it would cost me an arm and a leg to do so.

I wish they'd reduce the price of that damn Veyron. I want to replace my Fiesta with it but it's stupidly expensive. How dare they charge a lot for a premium product.

*grins*

to be fair they are already losing a few million on each one they make...

Hmmmmm, should I get this..or the Corair GT 120GB, or maybe even the Vertex 3?

Now now VB, we all know you can pop down the local car dealership and pick up a Ferarri for a tenner.. So how DARE Bugatti charge that for a Veyron !

shit hot product

Can you point to some reviews to support this? Its too late for me as I already invested in a pair of Vertex 3s but I'm curious. I had only found great things said about the Vertex 3s and not much info on the Corsair Force drives when I was building my last rig. At 249 USD (150 GBP?), they seemed like the right price, so i bought 2 (~300gbp) and am running them in Raid 0.

Attachment 3306

Wouldn't it be better to run a pair of smaller drives in Raid 0 than spend 400 GBP on a 240gb ssd?

No time soon. They're still considered "a luxury item". Similarly to why a 6990 OC SUPER MATRIX BAD BOI XXX 10G card costs £2000 (and the rest).

It's still a long process of setting the prices extremely high, as high as they feel they'll get away with for the small quantity they make, and as they become more popular, drop the price until the sales numbers balance the pricing.

The component costs are rediculously low in comparison, especially when you disect these drives and compare 60g to 240g. The p1ss take are the ones where the 240g is the same as the 120g, but with chips missing off the pcb. Not everyone does that, but it happens.

You think about it.. 240g... if someone were to offer you a 250g traditional hard drive for your pc, you'd laugh at them. Swap in the SSD and you still got to wait for your ISP to give you bandwidth to see your webpage, even tho it took you 10s to boot the machine up.

Still think in the long run SSDs need to mature. The way they've gone about the processing on hardware seems silly when you consider what they basically do, and consider how fast even your DDR pc is at read/writing to just the memory.

It works, but it will cause performance degradation, as TRIM isn't put in properly (I'm not completely sure how it works with Garbage Collection).

Only reason OCZ are popular is because they are cheap, have you seen the number of recalls they have to do? Their drives might look good in terms of numbers, but they degrade massively.

Moving on...

I can't watch the video because where I am atm the internet is too slow, but..

For CrystalDiskMark, what settings do you use (as in what filesize and how many runs/passes)?

Also it would be interesting to see performance degradation, and how the drive copes with being filled up. Say on a graph you could plot certain things' speeds against the % capacity filled.

Nice review though, and a nice SSD too by the looks of it.

What video?

Oh there's no video? In other forums the youtube video embed was taking about 30s longer than the rest of the page to come up, so I thought there was a vid

Even the youtube page takes about a minute to load up sometimes

Hmm, I remember paying £400 for a 4GB HD and I still have it in my drawer. Can't get myself to part with it Yes they are expensive and manufacturing costs don't warrant this. But the development costs unfortunately do! This is the fastest or 1 of the fastest SSD's out there atm and that title costs. Just look at GPU's... Anyway, if we all actually checked what we used on our drives and deleted the crap, temporary folders and downloads, etc. and put our videos/pictures/mp3's onto cheap mechanical drives, then 240GB is just fine for size. That means uber speed for all your applications, games, OS and fun bits all on 1 mega drive.

Simples...

Nah that doesn't cut it either when you have been able to buy these for a good while now.

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/220gb-ocz-25nm-revo-drive-x2-bootable-4-x-sandforce-1222-pci-e-x4-ssd-read-730mb-s-write-690mb-s

X3 are the newest ones I think, christ knows how fast they are. £362 tho.. (I know it's ocz )

You said it, thats's OCZ

hehe yeah.

FYI, I just seen the X3 on Scan's Today thing for £465.... 1000M read times ! z-o-m-g.

That would be Veyron e-peen

Taking all Free samples of unwanted SSD's