Kingston HyperX 120GB (SH100S3-120G) Review

PRICE IN INDIA

13,999

Earlier, we had a look at Kingston’s V+ 200 SSD which offered decent performance but for that price, you were better off with their HyperX series. Today, we have that very SSD with us and we’re about to find out how much better it actually is. We have the standard desktop version of the HyperX drive that comes with just a 3.5-inch bracket. More importantly, the SSD features the 25nm Synchronous flash memory, which should be a lot fast than their SSDNow series. Let’s find out.

3.5-inch bracket included

Design and Features 
Two flavours are available - a standard desktop edition and an upgrade kit - out of which, we received the former. The SSD is packed nicely in a layer of foam and even looks a bit better as compared to their standard offerings. The HyperX SSD features the same SandForce SF-2281 controller along with SATA III (6Gb/s) support that’s also backwards compatible with SATA II. You also get some of Kingston’s very own Advanced Wear-Levelling technology that helps the drive to last longer.

Good build

This being an SSD, there aren’t any moving parts so it does consume a lot less power and you won’t lose your data even if you drop it. The drive also supports TRIM, a command that allows the OS to wipe data blocks internally once the data is no longer needed. The HyperX drives are available in two capacities in India - 120GB and 240GB. Next, let’s see how this drive performs and if it can match the speeds of Intel’s 520 series SSDs but for a lot less. 

Performance 
For testing the drive, we connected the SSD to our Testbench, which consisted of an Intel 2600K, Gigabyte P67A-UD3R, 8GB G.Skill RAM, 64-bit Windows 7, WD Velociraptor and an AMD HD 7950 graphics card. All the settings were completely identical to the previous SSDs we tested, including the SATA port and cable. We start off with HD Tach, which returned quite a decent score of 410MB/s as the average read speed of the drive. SiSoft Sandra too gave us a very good speed of 455MB/s, which even surpassed the Intel SSD 520.

Pretty good performance

Coming to the real world scores however, the picture is quite different.  The real world write speeds are certainly a lot faster compared to the SSDNow V+200 drive, which is good, but is nowhere close to what the Intel SSD 520 manages to deliver. Same goes for the internal transfer between two partitions as well. The HyperX drive offers speeds that are close to double of the SSDNow, which is really good as you don’t pay a very big premium for this anyways. 

Verdict 
Kingston has priced the HyperX SSD 120GB at Rs.13,999 but you can find it in stores for as low as Rs.12,900. This makes it about Rs.3,000 more expensive than the SSDNow V+ 200 90GB but for this, you get more storage capacity and a much, much faster drive. This makes it good value for anyone looking for a relatively cheap, synchronous NAND-based SSD that uses the SD-2281 controller, then the Kingston HyperX SSD fits the bill perfectly. 

Storage
Capacity	120GB
Form Factor
2.5 inch	Yes
3.5 inch
Interface
Parallel ATA (PATA)
Serial ATA (SATA)	SATA 3
SCSI
SAS
Fibre Channel
Type
Solid State
Spindle	Yes
Buffer
Size (Cache)