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.
The HyperX SH1003S3/240G - Although we are sure it will come as a surprise here the Kingston HyperX SH103S3/240G is a 2.5 inch drive. Actually this is pretty much going to be the form factor in the future for most consumer (and many enterprise class) drives. It is easier and less expensive to manufacture SSDs in this size as they can fit both desktops and notebook (and in many cases ultrabooks and tablets). The outer shell is plastic, but has a metallic feel and unlike the SH100 that we showed you the other day this one is a dark grey. You have the same “X” of brushed metal in the center, but this time the HyperX logo has been crosscut differently (it appears much deeper and defined) to give it a very cool looking texture. As with our other SSDs we have in for testing we completely voided our warranty to take a look inside. After removing the four star-bit screws in the bottom (which is very boring) we carefully pried the SH103S3 apart and pulled out the PCB.
Unlike the SH100S3B we showed you here much of the lettering on the flash chips and even the controller has been removed by the thermal pads. However, we were able to get a close enough shot on both to read what is left. The SH103S3 still uses the same SandForce SF-2281VB1 SATA 3.0 controller, but as you might imagine has different NAND MLC flash chips. The ones used here are Intel (although some searches show them as IMFT or Intel Micron Flash Technologies) 29F16B08CCME3 25nm MLC NAND flash modules. These are pretty common in SSDs and are used by multiple manufacturers. These modules have a slightly lower P/E rating than the ones found in the HyperX SH100S3B and officially are only rated for 3,000 P/E cycles. This rating (as we have told you before) is not saying that after you have written and erased the module 3,000 times you are done. It is a conservative estimate of the minimum amount of program and erase cycles you would get under intensive write testing.
