The Box and Goodies -
The box that the HyperX SH100S3B 120GB upgrade kit arrived in was a pretty nice looking box. It has an image of the HyperX SSD on the front along with the eyes of Kingston’s Rex peeking out at the bottom right hand corner. For the true enthusiast though the big item will be the Sandforce label in the lower left-hand corner that will be the biggest item. As this kit contains more than a drive and a mounting bracket the box is a little larger than the standard ones.

The back of the box shows all of the fun things that you get in the upgrade kit. Once you lift the lid off of the box you are greeted with a very nice sight, the blue and grey of the Kingston HyperX SSD. This is secured in a foam tray that also has the mounting bracket underneath.

After you remove the nice foam insert that is protecting your new SSD you find some additional fun items underneath. Here we have a DVD that contains imaging software for backing up and /or cloning your drive. This software is from Acronis which is one of the more accessible cloning software products out there (and which we will talk about in more detail later). Beneath this is the reason you will be happy to have this piece of software; Kingston has included a USB SATA enclosure that can be used in helping you upgrade from your original drive to your new SSD.

In addition to a USB and SATA cable Kingston decided to add an extra touch to make their upgrade kit complete. This is a nice mini screwdriver. We have talked about other products in the past that have a need for smaller Phillips or Standard tip screw drivers yet do not include anything like this in their kits. Kingston decided to make sure you had one. It is this type of extra that helps to make Kingston such a great brand.

The HyperX SH100S3B 120GB -
The Kingston HyperX SH100S3B comes in a 2.5-inch form factor which fits well into many systems with a adapter tray and most laptops by default. The outer casing is nice looking with the familiar Kingston Blue as the secondary color and a brushed “X” over that. The Rex logo (still waiting on those Rex Coffee Cups too) is in the lower corner with a ridged HyperX in the opposite corner.

The underside is very plain, but does have the four star-bit screws that we are interested in to see the internals on this drive. Once you remove these four screws you can carefully open up the case (be warned doing this completely voids your warranty!). Inside we find a couple of pink insulating/heat absorbing pads (they feel really odd) that hold the actual solid state components in place.

When you get inside and take a look at the PCB you will find a nice cluster of Intel 29F64G08ACME2 Flash Memory modules. These are 25nm NAND Flash Modules that have a rating of 5000 P/E Cycles (program and erase) this means that you can write to the memory 5000 times AND erase the memory 5000 times during a single cycle. If that does not sound like a lot remember you can always perform a full secure erase which will restore that number (you will want to back up your data first) and that the P/E cycle is per sector of memory which is why you have trim firmware to make sure you are not always writing to the same spots on your SSD and wear out one section before the others.

At the heart of the HyperX SSD is a SandForce SF-2281VB-SDC SATA 3.0 (6Gb/s controller. This is what gives the drive is theoretical read the write times of up to 525MB/s and 480MB/s.

Performance -
Testing the performance of a drive of any type is a pain. Sure you can get repeatable numbers using a few of the more readily available testing utilities; HD Tune Pro, Sisoft’s SANDRA, AIDA64, and others. For our testing we decided to run HD Tune Pro along with Atto Bench and PCMark7’s storage tests. Between these we felt that we were able to compile a good range of information about the performance of the driver under synthetic workloads. To add to this we did a large disk to disk 30GB file transfer (moving from one SATA 3.0 SSD to the test drive and back) to get a good feel for real world read and write performance. The results are shown below in graph form as well as the actual screen shots of the results.

PCMark7 Storage Tests -
The PCMark 7 suite of storage tests is fairly intensive and includes scanning for malware, moving images, a video editing script and more items that require good HDD read and write speeds each one of these has its own transfer rate that will be recorded and combine to make up the overall score. The Kingston HyperX SH100S3B does very well with a combined score of 5181 which is just 5 points behind the Patriot Pyro SE.


Atto Disk Benchmark -
Under the Atto disk bench you get a series of tests run against the drive which have different sizes from 05KB to 80MB. We recorded the maximum transfer rate for both read and write. This was independent of the transfer size.

Here we find the Kingston HyperX tied with the Pyro SE for write speed, but a little behind for read. Still you are getting some very good transfer rates and at the speeds we are talking about you would not know the difference if you had them side by side.

HD Tune Pro 4.6 -
HD Tune Pro is another application that can give you the run down on your HDDs it performs both read and write tests although its write test is destructive and cannot be run on a drive that contains any partition information. For our testing here we ran both the read and write tests and recorded the average transfer rates.

HD Tune Pro Read Test	HD Tune Pro Write Test

Under HD Tune Pro 4.6 we find that the Kingston Hyper X is again a little behind the Pyro SE. Although this is surprising we still have to say that these speeds are very good across the board (even the slower SATA 2 F-120) that unless you are streaming video direct to another system or attempting to encode in real-time you would not be disappointed in any of these drives.

Real-World file transfer -
As a final test we took two 7.4GB ISOs and moved them from the main system HDD (a Kingston SH100S3B on the SATA 3.0 Controller) to the target drive. This was timed and the max transfer time was recorded. We also took the time for some subjective testing to see how fast the drives “feel” The scores and our observations are below. For the transfer of 15GB of data from one drive to the other internally it took a little under 90 second with a high transfer rate of 357MB/s not bad at all really.

After our fun moving files around we tried and installation from an .ISO mounted on the target drive as well as from loose files on the target drive. The Kingston performed very well here with no issues and was much faster than using the original media (we installed LightWave 3D 9.6 which we have in both formats).

Overall the performance of the Kingston HyperX SH1003B is solid, it might not be the fastest but it is up there and can certainly keep your data moving.

Value -
Value is another very subjective topic. What is expensive to some might be a deal to others. You can look at this topic in multiple ways. One is raw price and the other is what you get for the money. Each is accurate and both are correct ways to look at price/value. We tend to look at features, performance and real-property when we discuss value. However, we also take into account the raw cash cost of the item. The Kingston SH100S3B 120GB upgrade kit will set you back $190 from most e-tailers. This is in contrast to other drives with the same SandForce 2281 controller that cost $160 or more for just the drive. So for an extra $30 you will get a USB external enclosure and backup/drive cloning software. Considering the performance and the extras $190 is not a bad deal at all.

Conclusion -
Kingston has been working very hard to break away from their reputation for compatibly over performance. They have accomplished this in many ways with their HyperX line of products. However they have not forgotten to take care of their customers either. We see this in the attention to customer needs in the SH100S3B upgrade kit. The USB enclosure and the mini-screwdriver included are great touches on an already great product. If you do not need these you can get the standalone drive from Kingston for a little less. The read and write speeds are solid and will keep your data moving along very nicely indeed. We had no problems watching videos stored on the drive, installing from loose files or .ISOs that were on the SH100S3B. If you are looking to make the jump to an SSD then the Kingston upgrade kit should be at the top of your list; you get a great performing product and all the tools you need to get it working.

For its combination of performance, accessories and value we are awarding the Kingston SH100S3B 120GB Upgrade kit our Gold Key Award.
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