Kingston HyperX Predator HH-HL 480GB
It’s PCIe, so where’s the NVMe?
THINGS ARE CHANGING FAST in SSD land. For proof, look no further than the Kingston HyperX Predator 480GB. In many ways, it’s right at the bleeding edge of storage technology. And yet, it’s not quite the full next-gen package.
For starters, this version combines an M.2 board with a half-height PCI Express adapter board, making it physically compatible with almost any motherboard. It also cranks out peak performance numbers well beyond any conventional SATA SSD. But it’s missing a vital nextgen ingredient—instead of using the hot, new NVMe protocol, it makes do with AHCI, as seen in SATA drives.
In other words, the HyperX Predator is a stepping stone rather than a full leap to a next-gen drive. One obvious impact involves 4K random access performance, with 117K read IOPS and 78K write IOPS. That would be good for a SATA SSD, but well off the pace compared to some PCIe drives that support the new NVMe protocol. Whoops.
That said, omitting support for NVMe does bring one theoretical advantage. It should broaden support in terms of motherboards that can boot from this drive; you won’t need a mobo that supports NVMe. In practice, it’s difficult to be categorical. Testing the HyperX Predator with every possible system configuration is impossible. Reports from the field suggest that mileage varies significantly, so we advise careful research before assuming you’ll be able to boot into Windows with this SSD.
If you can, you’ll probably be pretty pleased with the results. It’s not quite as quick as the best NVMe drives, but its sequential transfer performance still beats a conventional SATA drive with a very big stick. As expected, 4K random access performance looks more like a very good SATA drive than a next-gen PCI Express drive.
As a compromise for systems that don’t support the NVMe protocol, and lack an M.2 slot, the Predator is super appealing. We just wish we could be more unequivocal about motherboard compatibility in terms of bootability.