Long Term Review – Kingston HyperX 240GB 3K SSD

With SSD drives one of the things which is difficult to tell with a conventional review is how reliable they will be.  I have been fortunate enough thanks to Kingston to have one of their HyperX 3K SSD drives on long term review. In the time I have had it two other SSD drives from other manufacturers have given up the ghost but the Kingston is still going strong.

The bundle version I have comes in a box with a mounting plate, a really nice external USB drive case and software to copy your old drives contents onto the SSD. The box even has a screwdriver for fitting the device. There are cheaper versions with just the drive itself.

Listeners to the TDL show will have heard me mention using this drive over the weeks and know that I’m really impressed with this drive. When connected to the latest SATA connection it is blindingly quick. They rate it as 555MB/s read an 510MB/s write and I was actually able to achieve ever so slightly faster scores on test. In real word use it worked equally well and Windows 7 positively zipped when booting from it.

As it uses a SandForce controller you get the benefit of that technologies clever ability to ensure a distributed write across the drives ‘surface’ ensure that the drive should last a very long time in real use (this is also why it is a 240GB drive not 256GB as the SandForce controller uses some of the space for its own use to facilitate this wear levelling.) We have estimated this should last the average user at least  5 years taking into account the devices 3000 program/erase cycle rating (hence 3K).

So to summarise reliable, fast and with recent price cuts affordable. If you are in the market for an SSD you should definitely give this drive a try but be aware you will need a decent SATA controller to really make full use of this.