Kingston HyperX Savage 240GB SATA SSD Review

Do you remember Kingston’s first HyperX SSD? It the one sporting an anodized blue aluminum and composite housing. A formidable high performance SSD that utilized a SandForce controller, that created a love-hate relationship among many enthusiasts. While one side blamed the motherboard chipset for some performance quirks, the other side pointed fingers at the controller. Thank goodness those days are gone!

Kingston has had plenty of time to consider a lot of different NAND and controller combos since then. For example, we’ve seen their entry-level enthusiast HyperX Fury do quit well, utilizing a Phison SATA 3.0 (6Gb/s) controller. Now, they’ve taken that Phison a step further for mid-range enthusiasts, offering higher performance with the new Kingston HyperX Savage SSD. Originally promised to us at CES 2015, we finally get to see just how Savage it really is!

Features and Specifications

The Kingston HyperX Savage essentially replaces the original Black HyperX 3K. The HyperX Savage SSD gets its performance from a Phison PS3110-S10 8-channel controller and asynchronous 20nm Toshiba (A19) NAND. The HyperX team has assured us that they’ve found a winning combo with these two manufacturers. Thanks to the 20nm NAND, HyperX can offer SSDs with larger capacities. That said, the HyperX Savage comes in 120GB up to nice and beefy 960GB models.

The Savage offers up to 560MB/s read and 530MB/s sequential write performance. IOPs gets up to 100,000 read and 89,000 write. These are pretty darn good specs for a mid-range SSD, as this used to be the higher end performance we’d find on more expensive drives.

What’s In The Box?

The HyperX Savage Upgrade Kit will come with everything you need to get setup with minimal fuss. The bundle includes a USB 3.0 enclosure for those that want to use it as a mobile storage device, USB micro-B cable, 3.5″ adapter bracket with screws, SATA cable, multi-bit tool, 7mm to 9.5mm adapter with screws (for notebooks) and Acronis migration software.

The Acronis software is very handy for mirroring over your current operating system partition. Just make sure you order one of the larger model Savage SSDs if you have a fat OS drive. Otherwise, you can always move the extra bloat files over to a platter and then mirror to the SSD of choice.

Test System Setup

The Kingston HyperX Savage SSD was paired with the same MSI X99 X99S XPower system we original used for testing the illustrious Intel SSD 750 PCIe card. The platform has plenty of PCI Express lane bandwidth. Here’s the run down of components.

• Processor: Intel Core i7-5960X Haswell Extreme
• Motherboard: MSI X99S XPower
• Memory:  Corsair Vengeance 16GB 2800MHz XLP
• Graphics: ZOTAC GeForce GTX 960 AMP! Extreme
• Storage 1: Kingston HyperX 3K 240GB (OS)
• Storage 2: Kingston HyperX Fury 240GB
• Storage 3: Kingston HyperX Savage 240GB (as tested)
• Power: be quiet! Dark Power Pro 850 Platinum
• Cooling: be quiet! Dark Rock Pro 3
• Enclosure: be quiet! Silent 800

We’ll of course be testing on on an installation of Windows 8.1, fully patched, and updated as of the publishing of this review. Let’s get on with the benchmarks!

Benchmarks

Three simple benchmarks were used to test the Kingston HyperX Savage SSD. The tests begin with CrystalDiskMark, which stresses the SSD’s ability to work with compressed files, followed by AS SSD for a good sequential test. ATTO Disk Benchmark takes us to the end.

CrystalDiskMark

The HyperX Savage seems to do a better job of handling CDM’s harsh compression. More performance is specifically gained sequentially with a little extra gained at the 4K block level. Perhaps there is more to the Phison controller than first thought.

AS SSD Benchmark

Again, the HyperX Savage scores well sequentially and especially in the 4K data block tests. So far, the HyperX Savage is shaping up to be a great little SSD. Lets check IO performance.

ATTO Disk Benchmark

At first glance, it seems like nothing has changed. But if you look carefully at the 4.0 block performance, the Phison controlled HyperX Savage achieves an impressive performance gain over the HyperX 3K all the way up the last test.

Final Thoughts

After just a few tests, it’s very apparent that the Kingston HyperX Savage 240GB SSD is a very worthy performer, replacing Kingston’s once mid-range enthusiast favorite HyperX 3K SSD. The Phison PS3110-S10 8-channel controller paired with asynchronous Toshiba NAND is obviously a more than capable pair. Performance is noticeably improved all around. In fact, compared to previous generation high performance synchronous SSDs, the HyperX Savage achieves the same performance if not better, topping 520MB/s read and 500MB/s write.

The second most important thing is that the HyperX Savage paired flawlessly with any Intel or AMD systems in the lab. Managing and setting up the SSD was free of any incompatibilities. My only concern is that the USB Micro-B 3.0 connector on the external enclosure isn’t the most durable interface. However, it isn’t a necessity to get maximum transfer potential, and chances are, once it’s installed, it’ll go in the tool bin for a while anyway.

After the controllers have cooled, I think it perfectly safe to say that Kingston really did their homework with the HyperX Savage SSD earning it an “A” in terms of performance and quality. Enthusiasts looking for the Savage series can find the 240GB for $150 US, 480GB for $290 and the 960GB beast for $570.