14 DAY TRIAL // California-based memory company Kingston has just announced its HyperX 3K SSD on its official website. This drive is a cheaper alternative to the well-known HyperX line of SSDs from Kingston, but the cost reduction comes at a later price.
Budget gamers and PC enthusiasts will benefit from the lower price of Kingston's new HyperX 3K SSD but should be warned that this solid-state drive combines a lower quality, 3000 program-erase cycle Toggle NAND, with a fast, second-generation, SandForce controller, the SF-2281.
While the controller might come center stage, buyers should keep in mind that because the regular HyperX uses 5K certified Intel NAND, there is an obvious life span difference, as the HyperX 3K has obviously lower quality MLC NAND specifications.
For the average user, this translates into a lifetime of around 5 to 10 years, instead of 10 to 15 years as is the case with 5K certified NAND. Of course, this depends on the nature of the workload of every user, but we shouldn’t be too welcoming towards products with such a short life span.
The 3K loads games and applications faster, can be used as a fast OS drive, increases frames per second for an improved gaming experience, and allows for quick transfers and edits of large media files – all this when compared to a standard HDD.
Kingston’s HyperX 3K provides high-speed SATA III 6Gb/s performance and fast random and sequential read/write speeds, but all of these are in standard tests.
The practical user will soon discover that the rated speeds of the SandForce based SSDs are not that high when the drive is half full, and that no TRIM treatment will make it work at the rated speeds if there’s data on it.
The HyperX 3K SSD comes in the usual aluminum case design, but this time it is black-themed.
HyperX 3K SSD is backed by a three-year warranty, which is a good thing considering that a power user might run through the drive's program erase cycles in much less time than the usual user.