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.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 HyperX 3K 240GB Upgrade kit will run you about $310 from your average etailer. This is a great price considering the software, tools, and the actual drive you are getting. This is about $40 less expensive than the 240GB 5K kit that Kingston has. The lower price is due to the lower P/E cycles of the Flash modules used, but in the end you are certainly not getting any less performance. The $310 price tag is also very comparable to other standalone 240GB SSDs so you are getting a full upgrade kit for what you might pay for just the drive in many cases.
Conclusion -
As with the HyperX 5K drive we like the performance and compatibility that Kingston has here. Again we cannot stress enough that Kingston is still maintaining great customer service here. They parts included here are not cheap and the disk closing software is very good (and simple to use). Anyone looking to upgrade to an SSD or even replace a smaller SSD would get a lot out of one of Kingston’s Upgrade kits. We have watched these kits evolve since Kingston first released the SSD Now series and are very impressed with where they are now. The actual SSD (the SH103S3) not only looks great (now we need HDD mounting cages that allow drives to be visible), but also performs much better than we expected. To be honest when we noted the use of 3K flash modules we expected the performance to be slightly less than the 5K, however this was not the case at all. The read and write performance was very good and outperformed our other test drives in almost all of our testing.
With the capacity, ease of use, and performance we saw we are awarding the Kingston HyperX 3K 240GB SSD Upgrade kit our Gold Key Award.
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