Kingston HyperX 3K 120GB SSD Review

Today we are taking a look at the latest Solid State Drive from Kingston - the HyperX 3K 120GB which utilises the performance oriented Sandforce SF 2281 controller. There is no doubt about it, the market today is flooded with solid state drives. Prices are dropping all the time and a wider audience are beginning to realise that adding one into a new system can dramatically improve the overall experience. Sandforce SF-2281 powered drives are a dime a dozen in 2012, but Kingston have released the Kingston HyperX 3K series with a primary focus on getting the lowest possible price. The 120GB version we are reviewing today for instance is only £118.99 inc vat from Overclockers in the UK. Six months ago, a drive like this would have cost £50 more, at least. '3K' means that Kingston have moved to cost effective 3k PE (program/erase cycles) NAND. '3K' means that the drive should last 3,000 full writes of the disk capacity. In reality the 3K drives will still last a long time, many years, under normal use. Specifications: Capacity: 120GB Controller: SandForce SF-2281 Maximum Read: 555MB/sec Maximum Write: 510MB/sec Max I/O Per Second (IOPS): 95000 IOPS (4KB File, READ) NAND Flash: Multi-Level Cell (MLC) Interface: SATA-III / 6Gbps (Backwards compatible with SATA-II / 3Gbps) TRIM Support (Requires Windows 7) Warranty: 3 Years The Kingston drive ships in a dramatically styled box featuring the product in the center with specifications listed in the corner. The bundle includes a quick start guide, mounting screws and a 2.5" to 3.5" adapter in metallic blue. The drive is protected within a tough foam padded container with the HyperX logo cut into it. The HyperX 3K is encased inside an iconic, stylish metallic chassis, which looks great under direct light, as shown above. Specifications are listed on the rear. Both sides of the chassis, have thick thermal pads for maximum heat dissipation. The drive uses the Sandforce 2281VB1 controller. Kingston are using Intel 29F64G08ACME3 memory. They are MLC NAND flash chips built on the 25nm architecture. The Sandforce 2281 controller can access eight separate NAND channels, and two NAND modules are placed on each channel. The drive uses the DuraWrite algorithm which delivers on the fly compression for improved overall performance. Kingston rate this particular 120GB drive capable of delivering sequential transfer speeds of 555MB/s read | 510MB/s Write. On this page we present some super high resolution images of the product taken with the 24.5MP Nikon D3X camera and 24-70mm ED lens. These will take much longer to open due to the dimensions, especially on slower connections. If you use these pictures on another site or publication, please credit Kitguru.net as the owner/source. For testing, the drives are all wiped and reset to factory settings by HDDerase V4. We try to use free or easily available 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. Main system: CPU: Intel Core i7 2700k 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 Enterprise Monitor: Dell U2410 Other Drives (used in Core i7 2700k system above): OCZ Vertex 4 512GB Transcend SSD720 128GB Kingston SSDNow V+200 90GB OCZ Octane 512GB (V1.13 fw) Mach Xtreme MX-DS Turbo 120GB Corsair Performance Pro 256GB Samsung 830 Series 512GB Patriot Pyro SE 240GB Patriot Wildfire 240GB MemoRight FTM Plus 240GB SSD Patriot Pyro 120GB SSD OCZ RevoDrive 3 x2 480GB Patriot Wildfire 120GB SSD OCZ Agility 3 240GB 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 MemoRight FTM.25 115GB SSD Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB PCIe drives test system: OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid 1TB HDD/SSD & OCZ RevoDrive 3 x2 480GB Test System: CPU: Intel Core i7 990x @ 4.8ghz Cooler: Corsair H100 Performance Liquid Cooler Motherboard: Asus Rampage III Black Edition Memory: 12GB Kingston DDR3 @ 1600mhz 9-9-9-24 PSU: ADATA 1200W Graphics: Nvidia GTX580 Chassis: Lian Li X2000F Operating System: Windows 7 64 bit Enterprise Monitor: Dell U2410 Software: Atto Disk Benchmark CrystalMark AS SSD PCMark 7 IOMeter 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 V3.0.1 x64. 4K QD32 performance is quite good, although Sandforce drives don't score as well when dealing with incompressible data. We enabled the ‘compressible’ data mode, otherwise known as ’0×00′. Read performance increases a little, and write performance increases by a huge margin, as we would expect. Above, some included compares from other leading solid state drives which we have reviewed in recent months. 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 Kingston HyperX 3K 120GB delivers very balanced results throughout, peaking at 555 MB/s read and 528 MB/s write. The write result is actually higher than the Kingston official claim of 510 MB/s. Some comparison results from other leading products available 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. AS SSD strictly deals with only incompressible data which means that the Sandforce drives can suffer a little. Still, the overall result would highlight that the Kingston HyperX 3K is not too far behind the Patriot Wildfire unit. PCMark 7 includes 7 PC tests for Windows 7, combining more than 25 individual workloads covering storage, computation, image and video manipulation, web browsing and gaming. Specifically designed to cover the full range of PC hardware from netbooks and tablets to notebooks and desktops, PCMark 7 offers complete PC performance testing for Windows 7 for home and business use. A score of 5,167 points is much as we would expect from a performance based Sandforce drive. No problems here. IOMeter is another open source synthetic benchmarking tool which is able to simulate the various loads placed on hard drive and solid state drive technology. We use a custom Kitguru configuration for 4k random write to measure performance. We use the same test, but for random read performance also. IOPS performance is strong, for a Sandforce 2281 powered drive. 4k random write performance rated at 41,335, with 4k random read dropping to 25,082 IOPS. Strong all round results and in the top 10% of 120GB Sandforce powered drives we have tested to date. 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. Strong performance, scoring 23 seconds, in line with the OCZ Octane 512GB and Samsung 820 Series 512GB drives. The Kingston drive scores 19 seconds, same as the OCZ Octane 512GB with fw 1.13. Good results. We have reviewed around 30 Solid State Drives powered by the Sandforce 2281 controller in the last year and it is becoming increasingly difficult to talk about the same controller in so many reviews. Thankfully Kingston are realising that to get noticed in this market that they need to focus on the price point. With so many companies releasing Sandforce 2281 drives such as ADATA, Transcend and Corsair the only genuine way to sell stock is to get the lowest possible price to the punter. Sure, there are differences between some of the drives, but they are normally so marginal that cost is one of the primary, deciding factors. Using 3K NAND means that Kingston have been able to drop the price to the punter. Kingston have managed to get this drive into stores at less than 1GB per £1. Overclockers are selling the 120GB drive for £118.99 inc vat. This makes it one of the best value drives on the market today, bar none. In regards to performance, we doubt the target audience will have any complaints. It is in the top group of Sandforce 2281 drives on the market, delivering 555 MB/s sequential read and 528 MB/s sequential write in the ATTO Benchmark. As we noted earlier, the write result is actually higher than the Kingston official claim of 510 MB/s. IOPS performance is also in the top sector of Sandforce results, scoring over 41,000 IOPS in our 4k random write test. The only real weakness would be incompressible data throughput, which is a widespread weakness with the 2281 controller. Other drives, such as the Samsung 820 Series make more sense if this is a priority. Let us not forget the new class leader, the OCZ Vertex 4 -which blew us away when we tested it last week. This new design has redefined the performance market with equal performance when dealing with incompressible and compressible data, however you will pay around £20 more, for the pleasure of ownership. Kingston have managed to achieve their goals, releasing a high performance drive at the lowest possible price. At less than £120 it really is rather silly to ignore it. Pros: Great compressible data performance. bargain price. strong 4k random IOPS throughput. 3 year warranty with Kingston. Cons: suffers with incompressible data. stiff competition. Vertex 4 is only £20 more. Kitguru says: A high value for money drive, ideal for a wide audience of enthusiast user. Less than £1 per GB, well done Kingston!