After our first run through with the Kingston HyperX SH100S3B 120GB SSD we had more than a few comments stating that 120GB was just not enough to work with. Although your typical 120GB drive is intended to be used as a boot drive with some basic applications installed on this drive it is not meant to be the only drive. Well people still did not want to hear about that so we managed to arrange to take a peek at Kingston’s next upgrade kit, the HyperX 3K 240GB upgrade kit which comes with a HyperX SH103S3 240GB SSD drive along with pretty much the same goodies you saw in the 120GB kit. So let’s take a quick look at what you have and then dive straight into performance.
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 much larger capacity HyperX SH103S3 does very well in our PCMark7 storage testing. We see that it is able to step ahead of the PyroSE here by about 10 points. 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. Under the pressure of Atto we find that the read speeds on the HyperX 3K 240GB SSD drop a little and fall behind both the SH100S3B and the PyroSE. However, the write speeds are much better than what we see with the other drive. 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. Under HD Tune Pro there is almost no comparison. The read and write times are better than what we see from the other drives in the group with an almost 90MB/s gap between the PyroSE and the SH103S3.
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 about 70 seconds with a high transfer rate of 364MB/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 SH103S3/240G is a fast product. Although not the fastest in all of our tests it is quite impressive. We do wish that the P/E cycle was higher, but you cannot have everything.
