HyperX 3K 480GB

$270 Kingston

Ihad to include a SandForce SSD. For one thing, they’re still available, and for another it’s always worth educating people away from them. SandForce used to be the monarch of the memory controller world, with SSD manufacturers lining up to use its technology. But it was left behind by more modern, faster models, and it’s the SandForce controller inside this drive that limits its performance so much. Especially when dealing with incompressible files.

The SF-2281 controller uses its own data compression algorithms to speed up performance, but when it comes up against files such as images and videos, which are already compressed, its speed drops through the floor. That’s most evident in its write performance: in the 4k random write test it’s five times slower than pretty much all the other drives I’ve tested this month.

You could argue that its consistency is impressive—it gets a good score on that front from PCMark 8—but unfortunately it’s consistently poor. When you’re hammering it with data it starts off at a slow pace and simply stays there. All the other drives will pick up their feet once the workload gets a little lighter, but not the HyperX.

Happily SandForce is making a comeback this year with support from its new owners, Seagate. Its SF-3700 range of controllers will run in both AHCI and NVMe drives this summer, and the big news is that it’s solved its compression problems.

For now, SandForce-based drives are simply not worth the money. It’s not even worth it for the storage capacity, when the MX100 is available for less.