Hyper X 3K

$ 300 Kingston

Welcome to the old school. There was a time when if you wanted a well-performing SSD you had to go for one with a Sand Force memory controller like this. But these days that tech is looking noticeably dated compared with that in even the cheapest SSDs.

Yes, the Hyper X’s quoted sequential read and write numbers are easily up there with the best, but those marketing-friendly figures don’t tell the whole story. The Sand Force controller’s trick is to use smart compression algorithms to squeeze data down into more manageable sizes that transfer faster. With uncompressed files that works fine—hence the high numbers. What it can’t work its magic with is data that’s already been compressed in some way, such as virtually all music, images and video. You know, the sort of files we all use on a daily basis. Sand Force performance with those files drops off a cliff, as shown by this drive, which posts the weakest sequential write performance in this round-up.

The random 4k performance of Sand Force drives is likewise well off the pace compared to the Marvell or Samsung-controlled SSDs, and that’s a great indication of how responsive they’ll feel in day-to-day use. The good news for Kingston is that of the three Sand Force-powered SSDs in this test, the Hyper X is the fastest for 4k files. Unfortunately the fact that it’s also one of the most expensive doesn’t make it a drive I can easily recommend. Its real-world performance isn’t a million miles away from the rest, but there are bigger, cheaper, faster SSDs available than this.