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SK hynix are on a bit of a roll at the moment after recently announcing a range of the world's first 72-layer NAND drives for the enterprise segment, and hopefully this technology will seep down the food chain to the consumer segment.
Talking of the consumer segment, the company have been busy here too, building on the success of the SL301 and SL308 drives with the SC311 range which brings the company's latest 48-layer V3 3D TLC NAND to the party.
SK hynix quote sequential read/write figures for the drive as up to 540MB/s & 530MB/s respectively – figures which were confirmed by the ATTO benchmark. When tested, the drive produced a 564MB/s read speed which is the same figure as the previous SL308 and SL301 drives. Write speed came in at 528MB/s, which is just below the maximum official figure, but is still faster than either the SL308 or SL301.
When it comes to random 4K performance, the official figures for the 512GB SC311 are up to 100,000 IOPS for reads and 90,000 IOPS for writes. Under test conditions using our 4K IOMeter tests we couldn't quite match that top figure for either with reads of 98,972 IOPS and 82,189 IOPS for writes.
Elsewhere, SK hynix’s drive management software is a very useful download. It may not be as comprehensive as competitor software (such as that available from Samsung or Crucial) but it is intuitive and stable. That said, we do feel that the cloning tool should be integrated into the main package rather than available as a separate download.
On the whole, the SK hynix SC311 is a solid consumer SSD that improves over the previous SL308 and SL301 drives.
Buy from Scan in the UK for £122.48 inc vat HERE
and you can buy the full range of SC311 from Novatech HERE
Pros
- 48-layer 3D TLC NAND.
- Overall performance.
Cons
- 3 year warranty is a bit mean.
- Drive cloning software still not part of the Drive Manager Easy Kit utility.
Kitguru says: The 500/512GB market segment is a very crowded one, but SK hynix has the massive advantage of having all the major components of a SSD drive in-house which gives them plenty of arm wrestling room when it comes to pricing the SL311 against its competitors.
