Vying for the Speed King crowd.
Good: Extremely fast; Eye catching design; Upgrade kit includes USB enclosure & appropriate tools
Bad: Write speeds are slower than rated on 120GB model; USB 2.0 enclosure
Price: AED 1,289 for Upgrade Kit and AED 1,217.50 for stand-along version
* The price is the Suggested Retail Price at the time of review. Please call a retailer to confirm the latest price for this product.
For testing the Kingston HyperX 120GB SATA III SSD, I have used ATTO Disk Benchmark v2.46 for Read & Write speeds plus HD Tach v3.0 for Burst speeds. To get a real world idea of performance, I have used PCMark 7’s Storage benchmark which runs simulated tests of moving and copying data within Windows environment as well as frequent data accessed during video editing and playing games. Unlike the speed tests though, PCMark 7 throws out a score at the end which is a combination of various speeds attained in during the simulated tests.
For comparisons of this latest SATA III based SSD, I have compared it to Kingston’s old V-Series 60GB SSDNow as well as a Western Digital VelociRaptor 300GB HDD. Both of these hard drives represent the best of the previous (i.e. SATA II) generation.
The SATA III performance of the HyperX 120GB blows the roof off our benchmark numbers. You might notice though, that the write speeds 385MBps aren’t as high as the rated speed of 480Mbps, even though the Read speeds are more than rated. Traditionally 120GB SSDs aren’t as fast as 240GB variants, the same goes for 60GB SSDs as well, that don’t perform as well as their 120GB brethren. Still, the box does advertise a specific speed and in our benchmark we fall short of it. That’s not to say that 380Mbps is anything but impressive. In the real world usage we can see through PCMark 7 that the SATA III SSD has a 35% performance increase over the old V-Series SSD, while the HyperX performs 150% faster than the 10,000rpm VelociRaptor HDD! While I do understand the reasoning for Kingston to bundle a USB 2.0 enclosure to keep costs down, I do wish there was some way to take full access of the awesome SSD inside.
So what the new Kingston HyperX SATA III SSDs represent is a new generation of insanely fast speeds that take multitasking on your computers to a whole new level. The 120GB HyperX Rev 3.0 SSDs should keep your computers running fast, increasing overall productivity and avoid the age old issue of waiting for things to load as the whole systems gets bogged down.
