Kingston HyperX Savage SSD (240GB) review: Definitely an SSD worth considering

Kingston is one of the known names in the Indian market thanks to its memory products such as RAM sticks, flash storage drives, wireless storage drives and so on. So much so, that even street vendors claim to be selling ‘Kingston’ branded pen drives, which are obviously fake. Kingston is also one of the few brands in India to have advertised its SSD offerings outdoors. The HyperX brand of Kingston is quite well known since there are memory sticks and SSDs selling under that name. While Kingston is more popular for the value series drives, with the HyperX Savage, Kingston is positioning a high end drive for use in performance rigs. Build and Features: 8/10  The HyperX Savage SSD comes in red and black colour tones, with the front face having the HyperX logo embossed in metal on a red back drop. The drive comes in four capacities such as 120GB, 240GB, 480GB and 960GB. We have got the 240GB model for test. It has a slim 7mm profile, which can help you fit it inside a laptop.  It comes with a Phison PS3110-S10 quad-core SSD controller which is an eight-channel controller. Of the four processor cores, three cores are employed in flash management. There are 16x 16GB Toshiba A19nm MLC flash packages with eight on them located on either side of the PCB. Apart from the controller and the flash storage, the drive also has a 256MB Nanya 1600MHz DRAM cache package.  The HyperX Savage SSD comes with an interesting package which includes an external SATA to USB case, mounting screws, a screw driver and a SATA cable. Test Setup Processor: Intel Core i7-4770K Motherboard: ASRock Z87M Extreme4 RAM: 2 x 4GB GSkill RipjawsX OS Drive: Intel SSD, 80GB PSU: Cooler Master 800W Silent Pro Gold OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit Performance: 8.5/10 ATTO Benchmark This is the most popular storage benchmarking tool and allows you to check read and write speeds across various transfer sizes and queue depths. ATTO is also a good tool to check for the marketing spiel of SSD makers where they publish sequential read and write speeds on the packaging.     Kingston advertises its sequential read and write speeds to be around 560MB/s and 530MB/s, which are easily achieved as can be seen from the numbers above. The sequential write speeds are the highest among its competition. AS SSD AS SSD is a benchmark tool built specifically for SSDs which uses incompressible data and calculates sequential and random read and write speeds and gives an overall score at the end. It also gives you the input/output operations per second or IOPS for each of those tests which is interesting. Apart from this you can also perform Copy Test where it creates test folders for large files simulating ISO, programs and games and measures the transfer speeds and duration.     The AS SSD scores are good enough for the Kingston HyperX Savage 240GB SSD but the last generation Samsung and Corsair SSDs showed a higher scores in sequential and 4K speeds. Although Kingston claims 100k and 89k read/write IOPS, the numbers above clearly show that they are off the mark. However, a 90k read and 75k write IOPs is not bad at all. PC Mark 7 PC Mark 7 is a complete PC benchmarking solution for Windows 7 having a dedicated Storage test module. It is a collection of workloads that isolate the performance of your PC’s SSD. The Secondary Storage test allows you to test drives other than your system drive. It simulates operations such as importing pictures, gaming, starting applications and so on.  Anvil Storage Utilities Anvil Storage utilities is another versatile SSD benchmark tool which besides having an in-built SSD tool, also allows you the option to tweak the settings. Just like the AS SSD benchmark, you get a read, write and an overall score. The tables are more in-depth as it gives you response time, IOPS, MB read/written and finally the transfer speeds in MB/s. You can perform threaded I/O read and write tests where you can adjust block size as well as the queue depth. We ran the SSD test using 100 per cent incompressible and 46 per cent compression.   Verdict and Price in India Kingston’s HyperX Savage gives a performance fit for it to be considered when building a high end enthusiast rig. The Phison PS3110-S10 controller outperforms Sandforce controller sporting SSDs and you get great write speeds on the drive and the drive performance isn’t far off from the Corsair Neutron GTX and the Samsung 840 Pro, which though older are still capable SSDs.  The bundle comprising the external casing, screwdriver add to the overall value. The HyperX Savage 240GB SSD will start selling in India from the end of this month onwards. The approximate price given to us by the company is Rs 9,500 which brings the cost per GB to around Rs 42.40. This is quite an attractive price-point for the performance offered by the drive. If you are looking to build a mid-range gaming rig or even a high end rig, this is surely an option you should consider.