Here at DecryptedTech we have always had covered a very wide range of products (as well as technologies). However, there is one item that we have never really gotten too deep into. This is direct attached storage and in particular Solid State Drives (SSDs). It is true that we do show you their performance in almost every motherboard review that we do here on the site, but we have never reviewed any SSDs exclusively. We have had many reasons for this not the last of which is there is still debate on how to properly test an SSD or HDD. While some feel that IOPs (Input Output Operations per Second) are key others want to know exactly how fast their data moves into and out of the drive. We sat down and have come up with what we hope is a good balance of synthetic and real world tests that will give you the best idea of how an SSD performs. So with that in mind we are going to dive into Kingston’s HyperX SH100S3B/120G 120GB Solid Sate Drive Upgrade Kit.
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 |
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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.
