Kingston HyperX Savage 240GB
A bundle of SATA-powered fun
HIGH PERFORMANCE for middling money. It’s a simple enough proposition Kingston is offering with the HyperX Savage 240GB. But is it true?
As reviewed, the HyperX Savage is a little more complicated. This is the upgrade bundle, with a recommended price of about 10 bucks more than the stand-alone drive; though, at retail, the stand-alone drive is usually a fair bit cheaper. For extra cash, you get a 2.5inch to 3.5-inch adapter, a SATA cable, Acronis True Image HD, a USB 3.0 enclosure, and even a screwdriver: all you need to smooth the transition of your existing installation on to a new drive. And it’s awesome value for money.
What about the drive itself? Inside, you’ll find a relatively new controller chip from Phison: the PS3110-S10. It’s pretty high-spec, with four processing cores and eight memory channels. Kingston has also gone for conventional MLC, rather than TLC, NAND memory. That bodes well for both longevity and performance, even if the three-year warranty is nothing special.
The claimed performance looks solid all around for a SATA SSD, and it’s worth noting that the Phison controller doesn’t suffer the same slowdowns with incompressible data that blights the SandForce controller in Kingston’s own SSDNow V300. In our benchmarks, the HyperX Savage looks nifty, too. Compared to the mega-money Samsung 850 Pro 2TB drive, there’s remarkably little in it by most metrics. In terms of the real-world computing experience delivered by both drives, we suspect you’d be very hard pressed to tell the two apart. Do you really care, for instance, if your file copying takes 2 minutes and 26 seconds, instead of 2 minutes and 16 seconds? Doubtful.
All of which means your choice and the value proposition comes down to longevity. The Samsung drive packs a massive 10-year warranty versus the three-year cover provided by Kingston. That’s not just a bit of a gap, it’s a chasm. But if you upgrade your SSDs at least every three years, it’s also academic. Factor in the Upgrade Kit goodies, and the HyperX Savage looks better value yet.