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Review: Kingston
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The introduction to the HyperX series was
done back in 2012, when I was looking at the Kingston HyperX 3K SSD, and from
that time up until now a few things have changed. The HyperX 3K continues to be
the fastest drive that you can get from Kingston but at the same time Kingston
has decided to expand the line up that carries the HyperX name, from USB flash
drives and RAM, to gaming headsets and peripherals. You can find out more about
the HyperX products simply by visiting their website.
It’s been a long time since I had the
opportunity to review a Kingston SSD, so when I saw the arrival of the Kingston
HyperX Fury I thought that this would be a very interesting drive to review.
The drive is not as fancy as the HyperX 3K, or the same speed, but it should be
fast enough to improve loading times when it comes to gaming. The HyperX Fury
SSD has a very simple look and it should be good value for its money. So
everything is looking good for the new Kingston SSD, now let's start the review
by taking a close look at the package and its contents.
Kingston HyperX Fury 240GB SSD
As always I will be first examining the
packaging and its contents.
Packaging
As we can see the front of the Kingston
HyperX Fury SSD is very simple. The SSD is displayed and also some of the basic
information that you need. This packaging is fine though for a drive that needs
to be low cost and still not compromise much on performance.
Here is the back of the Kingston HyperX
Fury SSD, inside you will also find a HyperX sticker and also an adaptor to
make the drive 9.5mm high.
A closer look at the Kingston HyperX Fury 240GB SSD
The top of the Kingston HyperX Fury SSD is,
as we can see, very simple and less colourful than the HyperX 3K but this is
something that we can expect from a value drive. Keep in mind that the drive looks
much better in real life than in pictures.
Drive underside, nothing to say, other than the screws appear to be on the top
side of the drive under the sticker.
Now let’s look at what’s inside the SSD.
Here
is a quick look at the HyperX Fury SSD.
Looking
at the top of the Kingston HyperX Fury SSD we find eight NAND chips.
On
the back of the SSD we find the Sandforce controller and another eight NAND
chips.
A
closer look at the NAND,
and
here is a look at the Sandforce controller.
Specifications
The following specifications are taken from
the official Kingston website, to find out more click here.
CrystalDiskInfo
In
the above screenshot we see all the available info for the Kingston HyperX Fury
SSD.
Let’s head to the next page where we
take a look at our testing methods and the review PC.
Test machine
For this review I will be using a computer
with the following configuration:
Hardware:
- Motherboard: AsRock Z77 Extreme 4 (Intel Z68
chipset) - Processor: Intel 2nd generation
Core i5 2500K @ 4Ghz - RAM: 2x4GB Kingston DDR3
- GFX: Onboard Intel HD 3000
- Sound: Onboard Realtek HD audio
controller - Hard disk OS: Corsair Nova 64GB
- PSU: Corsair CX430 430W
- Display: Futsiju Siemens 22”
- Operating System: Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit with
Service Pack 1
The Kingston HyperX Fury 240GB SSD was
connected to the Intel native SATA 6Gbps (port 1) on the Z77 motherboard of our
review PC and all tests on the drive were carried out with the drive connected
to this port. All power saving features were disabled during all of my
synthetic benchmarks.
AHCI mode was also selected for all drives
in the UEFI of our test PC, and all the tests were carried out in this mode. As
we can also see that the formatted size of the Kingston HyperX Fury SSD is 224GB.
The SATA 6Gbps drivers used on our review
PC were Intel Rapid Storage Technology (RST) Version 11.7.0.1013.
Test applications
To test the performance of the Kingston
HyperX Fury 240GB SSD, I will be using the following test applications in this
review.
- HD Tune
Pro - ATTO
- Iometer
- AS SSD
Benchmark - CrystalDiskMark
- Anvil’s
Storage Utilities - PCMark
Test procedures
I will start off our testing procedures
explanation by stating that I did not run many synthetic benchmarks on the Kingston
HyperX Fury SSD. You may ask why I have run so few synthetic benchmarks.
SSD technology has moved so fast in the
last couple of years, that basic synthetic benchmarks alone are now of very
limited use, as they don't really tell us much about performance and how the
drive will behave in the real world. I have therefore decided to show some
basic benchmarks for the Kingston HyperX Fury SSD, and will complement this
with advanced benchmarks using IOMeter and AS SSD benchmark. I will also show
how the Kingston HyperX Fury SSD performs in the real world.
The reality of SSD performance
While I can easily show you which SSD is
technically the faster, when you use one of these modern SSDs as an operating
system drive it becomes very difficult to tell them apart as far as performance
is concerned.
A typical use of a small capacity SSD at
the moment is to have your operating system and applications installed onto the
SSD. The performance difference compared to a traditional HDD is enormous,
however when you start to compare SSD to SSD the difference becomes almost
impossible to detect.
Let’s look at why this is the case.
Drive A can boot to the desktop in 8.11
seconds, and drive B can boot to the desktop in 8.12 seconds, the difference in
time is milliseconds, and can one really tell the difference?
The fact is, all modern SSDs are only
ticking over when they are only running the OS and launching applications, it’s
only when you get to some of the larger capacity SSDs, with enough free space
to be able to hold the actual data that you’re going to be working with, be
that video, audio or pictures, for example, that you actually get a tangible
difference in performance. This is where the SSDs with the better sequential
performance start to pull well ahead of the SSDs which have lower sequential read/write
performance.
Small file random IOPS vs sequential performance
IOPS
This is a fairly complex subject, but I
will do my best to explain things in a manner that is easy to understand.
The term IOPS is the amount of input or
output transactions that can take place in a one second interval, so for
example, if an SSD is quoted as being able to cope with 20,000 4K random write
IOPS, then the SSD should be able to cope with 20,000 input transactions in a
period of one second. If the same SSD is said to be able to produce 20,000 4K
random read IOPS, then the same SSD should be able to produce 20,000 4K random
read output transactions in a one second interval.
Ok, now we have some figures to work with,
the next question is how many IOPS are actually required?
This will depend on your usage pattern. If
you are a typical desktop user who browses the internet, does some word
processing or perhaps some audio or video editing, and perhaps plays a few
games, then in actual fact, you don’t need to have massive 4K random read/write
performance. The actual amount of 4K random performance that is required for a
fast and smooth running system for a desktop user with a usage pattern similar
to the above will be well under 1,000 4K IOPS.
On the other hand, if the SSD is being used
for running a large and complex database server, then 4K random performance is
the absolute measurement of how fast that server will run, as this type of
application does most of its input and output transactions in the 4K domain.
So why would I need an SSD with 80,000 4K
IOPS for a desktop?
In fact you don’t need this type of
performance for a desktop, but an SSD which is capable of coping with 80,000 4K
IOPS will be faster than an SSD which can only cope with 20,000 4K IOPS.
OK, I just said if under 1,000 4K IOPS are
actually required for typical desktop usage, why is an SSD with 80,000 4K IOPS
faster than an SSD with only 20,000 4K IOPS, confused?
You may ask, if I only require 1,000 4K
IOPS surely the rest is wasted?
While you may never need 80,000 4K IOPS,
IOPS is all about latency. The reason that an SSD can cope with as much as 80,000
4K IOPS is because latency in this domain is very low. With 4K files, even if
you require to process 500 of them at the same time, you are not talking about
a huge amount of data, it has far more to do with how long it takes the SSD to
process a single file, and the amount of time required to process a single 4K
is all about how long it takes for the SSD to access or store that data before
it can move on to the next transaction.
In other words an SSD with 80,000 4K IOPS
performance will handle those 500 files faster than the SSD with 20,000 IOPS.
So how will a desktop user even notice this
faster speed if so little 4K random IOPS and data are actually used?
Multitasking is a good example. The more
tasks you run at the same time, you more you will notice the speed difference.
Sequential performance
I have always maintained that sequential
performance was every bit as important as small random file performance for a
desktop SSD. Some highly regarded people on other sites found this statement
quite funny a couple of years ago when I made it, but my, how times have
changed in the world of SSD reviewing.
To me this was always so obvious for a
desktop user. For example, let’s say you want to launch an application or game.
Both have some fairly large files to load, and also a great many small files,
but the point is, even the smaller files are sequential in nature. Now let’s
say you’re into audio or video editing. Video files tend to be huge, and the
files are written or read sequentially. Isn’t this how many users are using
their PCs these days?
Summary
So how does this shape up in the real
world? Which is better, massive 4K IOPS or massive sequential performance?
In an ideal world you want both, as an SSD
with massive random 4K IOPS and sequential performance will always be faster
than an SSD that has high sequential performance and moderate 4K random IOPS
performance, and the same applies to an SSD that has massive 4K random
performance and moderate sequential performance. The SSD which has high
performance in both patterns will always be the faster SSD.
However, you can still have an SSD that is
very fast for desktop use that has moderate random 4K performance and massive
sequential performance, the same can be said about a drive having massive
random 4K performance and moderate sequential performance, as it is about
getting the balance right if you have to compromise on one or the other.
Drive preparation for running the tests
All the SSDs used in this article were in a
clean and fresh state when the testing period started. From then on, each drive
had to rely on its own NAND cleaning effectiveness for the remainder of the
tests.
- Both our spinning HDD drives were defragged
before the start of each test.
- All SSD and HDD used in this article had
their partitions aligned to the Windows 7 x64 defaults.
Where I use graphs in this article to
display results, I will use the following colours to make it easier, for our
readers to see which drive we are reviewing.
Kingston HyperX Fury
240GB SSD
Comparison SDD
Now let's head to the next page, where I
look at some basic benchmarks...
Reading Benchmarks
HD Tune
HD Tune – Sequential reading test
I present the graph below for comparison
with other recently tested drives.
The Kingston HyperX Fury starts this test
with only 407.9MB/Sec a result that it’s not very impressive.
ATTO disk benchmark
ATTO has become a standard tool for
measuring the data throughput of HDD and SSD. It measures the reading and
writing performance, using different file sizes and block sizes.
We all know that ATTO and the Sandforce controller
is an amazing combination, and the Kingston HyperX Fury SSD is no exception to
the rule. The drive reported some very interesting numbers, way above the 500MB
read/write that Kingston claims on their website. You can see these in the
above picture.
CrystalDiskMark 3.0
CrystalDiskMark is quite a handy
benchmarking application, as it focuses on the file sizes that can cause a
problem on a system drive.
The HyperX Fury SSD from Kingston continues
to show some very impressive numbers, both read and write speed were higher than
Kingston says in their website, nothing wrong with that.
Below I am posting two graphs that give a
more detailed view of the differences between the Kingston HyperX Fury and other
SSDs that I have tested so far.
Here
I present the graphs for the read speed tests. You can compare the Kingston
Fury SSD with other drives.
I
will continue presenting the graphs for the write speed tests. You can compare
the Kingston Fury SSD with other drives.
We can see that the Kingston HyperX Fury
SSD has very good performance with sequential data, but falls behind when it
comes to 4K random files. This is something that didn’t come as a surprise.
AS SSD Benchmark
AS SSD benchmark is a benchmarking tool
specifically designed to test SSDs. The application tests sequential reading
and writing performance, 4K random reading and writing performance.
AS SSD benchmark also tests 4K threaded
performance. This is very exciting, as this test is the first available test
that I am aware of, that simulates how a PC operating system actually works. A
modern PC and OS, such as Windows Vista/7 does not just run a single thread at
a time, it runs many threads. The AS SSD benchmark "4K 64Thrd" tests
run 64 threads simultaneously throughout the test. If this result is good, then
you can be pretty sure the drive will perform extremely well as a system drive.
After the tests complete, AS SSD benchmark
derives a total score for the drive being tested. This is based on all aspects
of the test results, and gives an indication of how the drive is performing
overall.
Now let’s look at the results for the Kingston
HyperX Fury SSD in the form of a screenshot. All our other comparison drives’
results are presented in the form of a graph.
The result here is very poor, I was
expecting that it would be closer to the V300.
Let's head to the next page and run some
tests using PCMark 8.....
PCMark Vantage - HDD Suite
For these tests we will be using
FutureMark’s PCMark Vantage. This suite of real world test applications is
highly regarded, as one of the most comprehensive ways of testing a computer’s
performance in the real world. The PCMark Vantage test application also
includes an HDD/SSD/USB Flash suite of testing procedures, designed to fully
test out the performance of an HDD/SSD to its limits.
PCMark Vantage HDD suite results
Here
I present the results for the Kingston HyperX Fury 240GB SSD.
Here is a detailed view of the performance
of the Kingston HyperX Fury SSD, and you can compare the result with other
drives that I have tested.
Here is the score that the Kingston HyperX
Fury SSD achieved in this test. We can see that in this test the Kingston SSD
was able to produce some good results and was also able to stay close to the
middle of the chart.
PC Mark 8 - HDD Suite
We have built quite a close relationship
with FutureMark software, the authors of the PCMark PC benchmarking software
that we use in our tests. I decided I would use PCMark Vantage as stopgap
measure until the more up-to-date PCMark 8 benchmarking suite became available.
I'm pleased to say that PCMark 8 is now available, and it gives me great
pleasure to introduce you all to the results obtained by this new 'real world'
benchmarking suite.
I will describe the basic way that each
test is carried out, above the graph for each test.
PC Mark 8 HDD suite results
Here
is a screenshot of the Kingston HyperX Fury SSD result.
This time the Kingston HyperX Fury didn’t
do that well in the Storage bandwidth test, it only managed 188.14MB/Sec.
The
Kingston SSD is the second slowest drive that I tested.
Again
the Kingston SSD was the second slowest drive, with an almost two second
difference from the fastest drive.
The
result speaks for itself, if you are into Photoshop then you need to look for
another drive.
Nothing
changed the Kingston is still the slowest SSD that I have tested, but you could
get away with this if you don’t do serious work in Photoshop.
This
is should be something that would make the Kingston HyperX Fury a more
desirable drive to store your games, and we can see that the
Fury
SSD is slow but in real usage I don’t think that anyone would be missing the two
seconds that much.
Once
again the Fury SSD is not showing the absolute speed of the other drives that I
have tested, but again we are talking
about
differences that are less than two seconds from the top drives.
0.6
seconds, that is how much slower the Fury SSD is in comparison to the fastest
drive that I tested.
Not
much to say, 0.1 seconds difference in speed will not be apparent in real life,
but only in various benchmarks.
Again
no significant difference in speed, only 0.2 seconds.
Summary:
It’s crystal clear that Fury SSD is not the
fastest drive that money can buy. Then again that drive was never aimed to dominate
the speed charts, although it still has good performance and is way faster that
any mechanical drive that you might have in your system.
Let's head to the next page for our
IOMeter test results.....
I/O Performance
There is little point of having an SSD
drive that has blazing sustained reading and writing speeds, if the drive can't
handle reading and writing of small random files. If you intend to use your new
SSD drive to store and run your operating system, then the drive must be able
to cope with the many small random files that Windows will write to the drive
continually. So I feel it is very important to test how many of these random
files that a drive can handle in one second. I believe that anything over 1,000
I/O’s per second would be enough for most users running a consumer grade
mainstream PC, and should provide a smooth running system. But obviously, the
more I/O's that a drive can handle, the faster the drive will feel and leave
more headroom for those huge multitasking sessions that users sometimes engage
in.
The things that I will look at are the
total I/O per second and total MB/s.
Partition alignment and sector boundaries
Windows 7 and Vista will automatically
align a partition to 4k boundaries during partition creation, Windows XP won’t.
It is imperative that an SSDs partition is aligned. Windows XP is also
restricted to sector boundaries, while Windows 7 will use 4k boundaries if it
can. The Kingston HyperX Fury is 4k boundary aware, and will use these
boundaries if possible. Of course it will also remap LBAs for compatibility
with the sector boundaries so that the drive can be used with Windows XP.
IOMeter allows us to set the sector
boundaries for conducting the tests, and I have therefore set the sector
boundaries at 4K, which means the IOMeter tests are valid for Windows 7 and
Windows Vista users. XP users will not be able to obtain such results.
I will provide a screenshot of the tests on
the review drive for those of you who like to see the actual test result. All
the comparison drive results are represented in the form of graphs.
If any of you would like to see a
screenshot from any IOMeter test on a particular drive, please feel free to
request one, and I’ll post the screenshot in the forum thread.
All the IOMeter tests create a 10GB data
set on the target drive, and each test is run for a duration of 3 minutes.
IOMeter 4K random write test with repeating data.
The first test involves creating continual
4KB random files on the target drive with IOMeter. I use a 4KB file size, as it
is believed that Windows will create and modify many of this size of file
constantly in the background during a typical Windows session. It is said that
most 4K random writes take place at a queue depth of only one.
Queue depth 1
Kingston HyperX Fury 240GB SSD (Queue depth 1)
Queue depth 4
Kingston HyperX Fury 240GB SSD (Queue depth 4)
Queue depth 32
Kingston HyperX Fury 240GB SSD (Queue depth 32)
4K random write queue depth profile
For this
test I used various queue depths from 1 – 32 to give you an idea how this SSD
performs at different queue depths. For a normal desktop user, with lightweight
multitasking, the queue depth will rarely rise above 2. For heavy multitasking,
the queue depth is unlikely to rise above a value of 8.
A detailed view of the write performance of
the Kingston HyperX Fury SSD compared to other drives at various Queue Depths.
IOMeter 4K random read test.
If there are many 4k files created, then
that must also mean that many 4k files need to be read. This test measures 4k
reading performance.
Queue depth 1
Kingston HyperX Fury 240GB SSD (Queue depth 1)
Queue depth 4
Kingston HyperX Fury 240GB SSD (Queue depth 4)
Queue depth 32
Kingston HyperX Fury 240GB SSD (Queue depth 32)
4K random read queue depth profile.
This test
shows how the review drive scales with increasing queue depths.
Here is a more detailed view of the performance
of the Kingston HyperX Fury SSD at different Queue Depths.
IOMeter 512KB write test with repeating data.
Sequential writing performance is also very
important; in this test sequential writing performance is measured.
Kingston HyperX Fury 240GB SSD 512K Sequential write with repeating data
Excellent sequential write speeds for the
Kingston HyperX Fury SSD.
IOMeter 512KB read test.
This test measures 512k sequential reading
performance.
Kingston HyperX Fury 240GB SSD SSD – 512K sequential reading test
When it comes to sequential reads, the
Kingston HyperX Fury SSD is simply fast.
IOMeter Workstation simulation (outstanding I/Os = 64).
When running applications you will find
that there is a mixture of small random files and larger sequential files,
being created, and read. Not only that, it isn’t just one file at a time. In
this test I measure a simulated workstation pattern, with a queue depth of 64
(threaded).
Kingston HyperX Fury 240GB SSD – Workstation simulation
Finishing this set of tests we see that the
Kingston HyperX Fury continues to give results that are not that impressive.
Summary
The Kingston HyperX Fury SSD continues to
show that it’s a drive that was made for users that don’t have very high
expectations but still want a drive that will be fast enough to do all of their
daily tasks.
Now let’s head to the next page where we
will look at how the Kingston HyperX Fury SSD
performs using Anvil's Storage utilities....
Anvil’s Storage Utilities
As well as performing SSD endurance tests.
Anvil’s Storage Utilities has a very nice SSD benchmarking application. The SSD
benchmark tests many different aspects of SSD performance, including 4K random
at different queue depths, and also sequential performance, but more importantly
than this, all using real test data.
Another very nice feature of Anvil’s SSD
benchmark is the fact that you can change the compression levels of the test
data. The compression levels of the data sets used for the tests can be varied
from 0% compression right up to 100% compressed data, and there are even a few
data profiles already included, such as database (8%) compression, and also an
application profile (46%) compression, which is designed to simulate real
application data being read and written to the SSD.
Anvil’s Storage Utilities is still in beta
at the moment, but the application is currently solid enough to use in this
article, and I have already verified the results obtained using an SATA
analyser.
I will include a screenshot of the review
drive, and all comparison results will be presented in the form of graphs. If
you would like to see screenshots of the test results obtained on the other
SSDs in this article, you can do so by following the link here.
I will also be testing three different
compression profiles, which are as follows.
- 0 fill (100% compressible data)
- Application simulation profile (46%
compressed) - 100% (non compressible data)
So let’s begin the tests.
0 fill
Kingston HyperX Fury 240GB SSD (0 fill)
Results
are ranked by highest total score.
The Kingston HyperX Fury SSD is forced to
take the third lowest place, and this has to do mainly with the write speed of
the drive.
Application profile
Kingston HyperX Fury 240GB SSD (application profile)
Results are ranked by highest total score.
Again the Fury SSD is in the same place for
the same reasons.
100% incompressible
Kingston HyperX Fury 240GB SSD (100% incompressible)
Results are based on the total highest score.
As expected nothing has changed, the
Kingston HyperX Fury SSD is glued to the same position, and this has to do with
the write speed.
Summary
Not much to be said about the Kingston
HyperX Fury, the numbers tell everything.
Now let's head to the next page for some
real world tests....
It has become clear that simply conducting
endless benchmarks on SSD drives is pointless. Real users may run a few
benchmarks when they first fit their SSD drive, but most users just want a
drive that performs well in the real world. They want their drive to work
"out of the box" and work fast and smoothly.
Most of the latest SSD drives can deliver
very fast sustained reading and writing speeds, but these alone tell you very
little about how the drive will perform in the real world.
If you intend to use your SSD as your
primary system drive, with an operating system and applications installed and
running from the drive, real world performance becomes much more important than
just fast sequential read and write speeds, in this case I felt that it was
time to move into a different method of testing.
From now on I will only use the log files
from the Event Viewer to measure the start-up and shutdown of the system, and
also use filecopy to measure all my copy tests from a RAM disk to the selected
storage drive that I will be testing. For these tests I will also enable all
power savings features that are available, since I believe that this is the way
that the majority of the users will have them set on their PC.
Real
world copy tests
I will now conduct some real world copy tests
so that you can have a much better view of how the drive will perform. In these
simple tests I try to simulate what a real user does with their drives. I will
be copying some mp3 files, various picture and MKV files, and finishing by
installing MS Office 2007.
As I said earlier from now on all my test
files will be stored in a RAM disk and copied/pasted to the destination drive
using filecopy. The filecopy utility will be used from now on for all my tests,
and I’ll be using it this way to measure the time that it takes to copy the
files.
Before I move on to the test, I want to
give you an idea on how fast your RAM is. Below you can find the results.
As
we can clearly see speed isn’t going to be an issue in these tests.
Copy tests – 259 MP3 song files (1.36GB total)
I will start this set of tests by copying
259 MP3 files from the RAM disk to the destination SSD, the Kingston HyperX
Fury SSD is unfortunately the slowest SSD on this test.
Copy tests – 3,377 JPEG picture files (2.56GB total)
Continuing my set of tests, and this time I
will be copying 3.377 picture files that are stored in the RAM disk to the Kingston
HyperX Fury SSD. A good result for the Fury SSD.
Copy Tests – 1 MKV and 1 SRT file (3.46GB)
Copying a movie is very common task, in this
test there are two files, an MKV and an SRT file, and the Kingston HyperX Fury again
shows good performance.
WinRAR – Compressing and extracting a full DVD
For this test, I copied the contents of the
'Iron Man' movie to the hard drive, then used WinRAR to compress the movie, and
also to decompress it. In WinRAR I used the store setting. Now let's see how
the tested SSD performs.
The Kingston HyperX fury is not a top
performer in this test.
Windows start-up and closedown based on the Event Viewer
Logs
Start-up & Shutdown time
The next two screen shots were taken after I'd
installed all the drivers and software that I use every day. Below are the
results.
The
best result so far for the Kingston HyperX Fury SSD.
Used
state shutdown, again measured in milliseconds.
Excellent performance for the Kingston
HyperX Fury SSD when it comes to start up time, and also an acceptable result
when it comes to shutdown.
Installing applications
Installing applications is possibly
something you don't do that often. But should you replace your system disk,
then you will most likely have to re-install your applications. Most of the SSD
drives I have tested up until now are quite slow at installing applications,
most likely because their I/O performance was quite limited.
For these tests, we picked some popular
applications and copied the entire contents of the CD or DVD media to the RAM disk.
We did this to make sure that the reading speed of our CD/DVD reader would not
hamper the performance of the target drive.
We then installed these applications onto
our comparison HDD drives, which were all running mirror image installations of
our Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit installation, and timed the amount of time
taken to install the application with a stopwatch on each of the drives.
MS Office 2007 Enterprise (full install)
Now let’s see
how the Kingston HyperX Fury SSD
performs with the installation of MS Office 2007 Enterprise Edition.
The procedure
followed was very simple. I copied all the files from the CD to the RAM disk and
used the virtual drive as a source for the installation files.
Another result that was very impressive for
the Kingston HyperX Fury SSD, only 103 seconds to install MS office.
Speed degradation after heavy testing
On this page I will measure how the SSD
performs after heavy testing and usage.
I will run an AS SSD benchmark test when
the OS is freshly installed so that we can get a good view of how the drive
performs with the OS. After that I will fill the drive up to 50% of its
capacity, use the drive for a few days, and then re-run the AS SSD benchmark.
The same procedure will be followed once again, but this time the drive will be
filled close to 90% or higher of its capacity. To finish this test, I will
simply delete all the extra data and leave the PC idle for a few hours so that
the controller has the time to perform any necessary cleaning, then see how the
drive performs.
In the picture below you will find all the
applications that were installed for this test using ninite, and I have also installed Microsoft
Office 2007.
Now let’s start our tests.
Here is the first test run for the Kingston
HyperX Fury SSD. With the drive having only the necessary drives and
applications that I need to run my PC. We can see that there is a small drop in
write performance but overall the result is very close to the one that I got
with the drive being installed as a spare drive.
Now I have filled the drive with data and
left only 4GB of free space we can see that the drive is still giving us good
results.
Deleting some of files, and leaving the drive
with almost 120GB of free space, we can see that it’s able to continue to give
a good result.
After removing all the extra data, and
running the same test we see that the drive did gave pretty much the same
result that I got when I first ran it.
This concludes our review. To read the final
thoughts and conclusion, click the link below....
Conclusion:
Let us summarise the most important
positive and negative points below:
To sum up, this is what I would say:
-
The major complaint that I have with the
Fury SSD is the slow write speeds, and in some tests the read speed wasn’t very
impressive.
+
The Kingston HyperX Fury SSD is a good drive,
although it's clear that it doesn’t have the performance we would expect from a
drive that has the HyperX nam,e and truthfully it won't make your jaw drop to
the floor. But as with most SSDs it will outperform any mechanical drive that
you are still using to store your OS or games, it’s very well built, and comes
with the typical three year warranty that we are used to. The packaging is
simple and inside there is a nice little sticker with the HyperX logo but, more
importantly, there is also a 7mm to 9.5mm adapter.
The parting sentence is:
“It comes down to the price, if you can
find the Kingston HyperX Fury at a very aggressive price, then you should look
at it, especially for a second drive to store games.”
I therefore give the 'Good' rating to the Kingston
HyperX Fury 240GB SSD.
Thanks to:
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EFD |
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Alex Schepeljanski for |
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FutureMark for providing a
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