Kingston HyperX Savage

Kingston HyperX Savage - Introduction Kingston has a long and rather sterling reputation for pushing the boundaries of the solid state drive industry, and in the process creating some of the best mainstream and value orientated drives available. For instance, Kingston was the ones to see the true potential in the original Intel controller and offer the V-40. A solid state drive so popular that Intel themselves stepped in to kill it and then turned around and made their own 'version'…of the exact same drive. That is the kind of outside the box thinking Kingston is known for. Unfortunately, in recent times they have stumbled a bit and the furor of their V series silent change of NAND was…..rather extreme to say the least. The Kingston HyperX Savage series is Kingston's response to the vocal feedback and their best effort to offer a drive that is both powerful, yet frugally priced. In other words its Kingston's effort to replace their tarnished V series with a new model that can offer all that the pre-change V series could do, and yet do so without requiring any 'silent' upgrades later on. That may be easy to say, but doing precisely all that is bloody difficult with only a few companies being able to pull it off. In order to do this Kingston started with a blank slate and every single internal component has been changed with zero parts carried over from the V series. The most obvious is that this series is one of the few to opt for a controller from a previously little known PHISON controller company. In fact the Savage is one of the first to use PHISON's latest creation: the PHISON PS3110. This controller goes about things in a radically different way from how the V series' SandForce SF2200 controller does things. Backstopping this NAND is cutting edge Toshiba A19 Toggle Mode NAND that is also radically different from the ONFi 1 that the V series relied upon (and caused all the uproar in the first place). This massive change was needed as the SandForce controller previously used is downright decrepit by modern standards, and with ONFi 2 NAND supplies drying up - and ONFi 1 shown to be a non-starter with consumers, these massive changes are not as surprising as it first sounds. This radical change is still impressive however and we do look forward to seeing what they can do with an entirely new game plan. After all most consumers do not actually care how the performance is created…just that it has performance to burn. We will of course go over the how and why of this drive, but at the end of the day this $95 drive has already passed the first hurdle: price. At $95 this series is actually cheaper than the class leading Crucial MX200 250GB SSD and that is indeed the gold standard upon which all value orientated drives must be judged. As that is the drive to beat we will also be including the MX200 250GB SSD so that consumers will be able to directly weigh the pros and cons of the Savage against an already 'proven' series and as such see if its abilities best align with their particular needs. Kingston HyperX Savage - Closer Look Because our sample is the slightly more expensive Bundle Kit our Savage 240GB drive came in a rather large - for a Solid State Drive - shipping container. This is because with the Bundle Kit you get a heck of a lot more than just a drive! Before we move on to exactly what you get, there is one nice little bonus feature that purchasing the Bundle Kit nets you: much improved protection. Instead of just a plastic tray, or similar levels of protection that standalone solid state drives come with, this bad boy comes cocooned inside a medium density foam liner that will protect this drive from downright extreme levels of abuse. Unless Mister Postman runs the box over with his truck we doubt it can be killed in-transit. This level of peace of mind is all by itself worth the couple extra dollars. By the same token the accessories which comes with the Bundle Kit are nothing to sneeze at. Not only do you get a SATA 6Gb/s cable, and 3.5' adapter plate, and a free copy of Acronis True Image HD, you also get a USB 3.0 enclosure, and a Kingston branded multi-head screwdriver. This combination makes cloning your old drive to your new Kingston Savage drive a snap - even if you do not have a free SATA port. We truly wish more companies would offer such a 'Bundle Kit' as this makes things so much easier. As with most HyperX models, the HyperX Savage is rather striking looking. Everything from its big, bold red 'X' to the 'Savage' imprinted along the bottom border simply makes this drive standout from the typical entry level drive. Also of note is that this device makes use of the smaller 7mm form-factor instead of the older 9.5mm Z-height form-factor (it does come with a 2.5mm adapter though if you need 9.5mm z-height). This allows the Savage to fit inside smaller form-factor devices that older Kingston models would simply not fit. By cracking open the chassis and looking inside we can see that Kingston pulled out all the stops with this drive. First and foremost, unlike say the Crucial BX100 the HyperX Savage makes use of a full length PCB - and has fully populated it with 16 NAND ICs. Equally impressive is that Kingston did not opt for ONFi 3 NAND ICs, instead they went for the ultra-potent Toshiba A19 Toggle Mode NAND ICs. These NAND ICs are found mainly inside enthusiast grade solid state drives and are simply better than what even Crucial and their MX200 series uses. We can with 100% confidence say the ONFi 3 NAND ICs are 128Gbit NAND ICs and on 240GB drives it does not take that many to reach that storage level. This impacts NAND Interleaving - the number of NAND cells per channel. Crucial and others are fully aware of this and have used either smaller 4 channel controllers (BX100) or Drive Write Acceleration and other firmware hacks to boost performance on their 8 channel controller models (MX200). Compare and contrast that with this 64Gbit NAND ICs which are faster and require more ICs to hit the 240GB capacity. Long story short, with more NAND cells on each of the eight channels, and each of these cells simply faster than ONFI 1, 2 or 3 counterparts Kingston has thrown down the gauntlet with this beast! While the NAND is extremely interesting what the real star of this show is, is the Phison PS3110 controller (backstopped by a moderately sized 256MB DDR3-1600 ram buffer). Outside of USB flashdrive manufactures, Phison is not exactly a household name. In fact, some of their first attempts at making a Solid State Drive controller were met with rather tepid reception. This time however, Phison has come up with a controller that is darn interesting. On the surface saying that the PS3110 is interesting may seem counter-intuitive. After all, using 8 channels and offering 550/530 MBps read and write performance with 100K/90K random IOPS is pretty much par for the course these days. So too is using a quad-core design for the controller. No it's not it's shear performance that makes this new controller a standout; rather it is how this drive handles load-balancing. In modern solid state drives, the controller and NAND are rarely idle. In fact, the controller is continuously waging a delicate balancing act between real time I/O requests, and garbage collection (and other low level tasks) that allow those I/O requests to be carried out on 'clean' NAND. In fact it is safe to say that a lot of what firmware enhancements boil down to is modifying how much of the cores activities are centered towards keeping NAND from entering a degraded state and how much is dedicated towards the end users demands! Or at least that is how most controllers do things. The PS3110 on the other hand is designed using a completely different approach. Instead of have 'X' percent of all the cores working on real time IO requests and the rest of the time keeping the NAND clean, the PS3110 simply dedicates one core to real time requests and uses the other three for garbage collection and the other low level tasks that keep the drive 'fast'. Time will tell whether or not this move is brilliant or insane…but it sure is different and there is almost no chances of a home user ever getting this drive into a degraded state! As an added benefit, since the PS3110 has three cores for internal housecleaning, the data retention abilities of this drive are equally impressive. Unlike most drives that only read 'static' data every so often to ensure that it is not becoming corrupted, the PS3110 actively reads all the NAND cells and tests the results against its ECC. By doing this data that is not quite corrupted but on its way to being just that can be caught before it becomes a problem and fixed - all seamlessly with no interaction with the host system or OS. It is this combination of excellent price, top notch NAND, and cutting edge controller that makes the Kingston HyperX Savage so exciting. Kingston HyperX Savage - Testing Methodology The reasons to purchase a high performance storage device are as varied as the consumers who purchase them. For some application load time is the deciding factor in their purchasing decision. For others it is Virtualized Operating System performance. For others still it is game load times. For others still it is to shave a .1 of second off their synthetic test scores so as to climb ever higher in the online rankings that various sites host. With such a wide variety of criteria it behooves us to use as wide and varied a list of testing protocols as possible. As such we have used a blend of synthetic and real world benchmarks, as well as custom recorded real world game benchmarking. For custom game play we have chosen popular titles: Borderlands 2, Call of Duty: Ghosts, and Saints Row 3. These games should give a good overview of the potential performance a given storage device will offer in real world game centric scenarios. For game load times testing we have chosen games which are clearly not Internet, GPU, RAM or CPU bottlenecked. The system was cold restarted in between each load to make sure no data saved in the GPU’s ram could influence load times. As with all tests all games were run four times and an average rounded the nearest second is recorded as the official result. For the Call of Duty: Ghosts we timed the level load time for the map called Into the Deep in the single player game. This level was chosen as it contains a large map and loads a lot of data from the storage device to the GPU. For Borderlands 2 we have recorded the time it takes to fast travel from Sanctuary map to Oasis. Oasis is the beginning of the Captain Scarlett and Her Pirate's Booty DLC. This was chosen as it not only is a special level not included in the original Borderlands 2 game and thus contains additional data which should slow the load of this special map. For Saints Row 3 (labelled ‘SR3’ in the chart) we have recorded the load time from a specific save game. The game was saved just at the end of the ‘Shaundi saved’ version of “Three Way Ending” but before the cut scene. This was chosen as the game not only loads the Three Way Ending data but also the next level “Gangsta’s in Space” DLC level. For synthetic tests we used a combination of the ATTO Disk Benchmark, AS-SSD, Crystal Disk Benchmark, HDTach, HD Tune, and IOMeter. For real world (non-gaming orientated) testing we have used OS startup, Adobe Photoshop, VMWare, and data transfer times. For data transfer we timed how long a single 30GB rar file took to copy to and then from the devices. We also used 15gb of small files (from 100kb to 200MB) with a total 36,000 files in 1200 subfolders. All tests were run 4 times and average results are represented. To ensure optimum performance in between each test run the device was sanitary erased. Main Test System Processor: Intel i7 5930K Memory: 32GB (4x8GB) Crucial Ballistic Elite Motherboard: Asus Sabertooth X99 Cooling: Noctua U12S SSD: 1x Intel 750 1.2TB NVMe SSD Power Supply: Corsair AX860i Monitor: Dell U2714H OS: Windows 7 Ultimate x64 SP1 Kingston HyperX Savage - HD Tune Read Bandwidth For this benchmark, HD Tune Pro was used. It shows the potential read speed which you are likely to experience with these storage devices. We don’t put much stock in Burst speed readings and thus we no longer included it. The most important number is the Average Speed number. This number will tell you what to expect from a given drive in normal, day to day operations. The higher the average the faster your entire system will seem. Write Performance For this benchmark HD Tune Pro was used. To run the write benchmark on a drive, you must first remove all partitions from that drive and then and only then will it allow you to run this test. Unlike some other benchmarking utilities the HD Tune Pro writes across the full area of the drive, thus it easily shows any weakness a drive may have. As this is a modern SATA/AHCI based solid state drive these numbers are right in the ballpark for what you expect a drive to act like. In other words, water is wet, the sky is blue, and if you want even more speed - which few will ever be able to properly harness - you will need to look at NVMe based drives. Kingston HyperX Savage - ATTO Disk Benchmark The ATTO disk benchmark tests the drives read and write speeds using gradually larger size files. For these tests, the ATTO program was set to run from its smallest to largest value (.5KB to 8192KB) and the total length was set to 256MB. The test program then spits out an extrapolated performance figure in megabytes per second. Once again these results are very good and extremely impressive considering this drive costs under $100. To be perfectly candid it was not that long ago you would have had to spend 2-3 times more to get this level of performance! Kingston HyperX Savage - Crystal DiskMark Crystal DiskMark is designed to quickly test the performance of your hard drives. Currently, the program allows to measure sequential and random read/write speeds; and allows you to set the number of tests iterations to run. We left the number of tests at 5 and size at 100MB. Once again this drive is downright fast for a SATA drive and even better at lower queue depth performance than a MX200 250GB drive. That is no mean feat, and rather impressive. Kingston HyperX Savage - AS-SSD AS-SSD is designed to quickly test the performance of your drives. Currently, the program allows to measure sequential and small 4K read/write speeds as well as 4K file speed at a queue depth of 6. While its primary goal is to accurately test Solid State Drives, it does equally well on all storage mediums it just takes longer to run each test as each test reads or writes 1GB of data. As with Crystal DiskMark, AS-SSD is showing this drive to be almost as fast as the 1TB Crucial MX200. That is rather interesting and it is something we will be playing close attention to in the real-world tests. Kingston HyperX Savage - IOMETER: File Server Test To test each drive we ran 6 test runs per device (1,4,16,64,128,256 queue depth) each test having 8 parts, each part lasting 10 min w/ an additional 20 second ramp up. The 6 subparts were set to run 100% random, 75% read 25% write; testing 512b, 4k,8k,16k,32k,64k size chunks of data. When each test is finished IOMeter spits out a report, in that reports each of the 6 subtests are given a score in I/Os per second. We then take these 8 numbers add them together and divide by 6. This gives us an average score for that particular queue depth that is heavily weighted for file server usage. For workstations this would not be our first choice - no AHCI/SATA drive would be- but thanks to that unique controller this drive is able to not only keep up with the work load but actually stay ahead of it. These abilities really do keep performance higher than you normally would encounter in even mainstream solid state drives. Considering you can almost get two of these drives for what a high end mainstream drive costs that is rather impressive to say the least. Kingston HyperX Savage - System Boot Time When it comes to hard drive performance there is one area that even the most oblivious user notices: how long it takes to load the Operating System. While all the other tests were run with a Windows 7 operating system, this particular test uses another older test bed's “day to day” OS (copied over to our new test bed) which has accumulated a lot of crud over the months from installs and removals. We chose the Anti-Virus splash screen as our finish line as it is the last program to be loaded on start up. Nowadays it is darn hard to pick a bad SSD, but it still is possible. Thankfully, you don't have to worry about this drive being a sub-optimal choice, instead we can honestly say that this is not only a good choice but a downright excellent one. Kingston HyperX Savage - Real World Data Transfers No matter how good a synthetic benchmark like IOMeter is, it cannot really tell you how your hard drive will perform in “real world” situations. To this end we will be running timed data transfers to give you a general idea of how its performance relates to real life use. To help replicate worse case scenarios we will transfer a 30.00GB contiguous file, then a folder containing 1200 subfolders with a total 36,000 files varying in length from 200mb to 100kb (15.00 GB total). Testing will include transfer to and transferring from the devices, using MS RichCopy and logging the performance of the drive. Here is what we found. Honestly, this drive is fast but if you want to get a drive that is noticeably faster you will have to get away from SATA based models. Of course if you do that you better be ready for the sticker shock - as NVMe drives are expensive! Kingston HyperX Savage - ADOBE CS6 LOAD TIME Photoshop is a notoriously slow loading program under the best of circumstances, and while the latest version is actually pretty decent, when you add in a bunch of extra brushes and the such you get a really great torture test which can bring even the best of the best to their knees. Let’s see how our review unit faired in the Adobe crucible! Once again the combination of a good controller with excellent NAND is a winning one, and the end result is a drive that can compete with much larger capacity models. Kingston HyperX Savage - VMWare Load Time Performance VMWare is a powerful application which allows users the ability to run a virtualized Operating System from inside their main OS. This program is not only processor and RAM intensive but puts significant load on the storage subsystem with deep, heavy read/write IO requests to the drive. To help give you a general idea on the performance improvements from running a RAM Drive we have timed the time it takes to load XP SP3 from inside VMWare. As with IOMeter our first choice would not be a classic AHCI based SATA solid state drive for VMWare, but if we had to use a drive for such a torture test we would have no hesitations in opting for this inexpensive bad boy! Kingston HyperX Savage - Borderlands 2 Load time For Borderlands 2 we have recorded the time it takes to fast travel from Sanctuary map to Oasis. Oasis is the beginning of the Captain Scarlett and Her Pirate's Booty DLC. This was chosen as it not only is a special level not included in the original Borderlands 2 game and thus contains additional data which should slow the load of this special map. Kingston HyperX Savage - CoD: Ghosts Load time For the Call of Duty: Ghosts we timed the level load time for the map called Into the Deep in the single player game. This level was chosen as it contains a large map and loads a lot of data from the storage device to the GPU. Kingston HyperX Savage - Saints Row 3 Load time For Saints Row 3 (labelled ‘SR3’ in the chart) we have recorded the load time from a specific save game. The game was saved just at the end of the ‘Shaundi saved’ version of “Three Way Ending” but before the cut scene. This was chosen as the game not only loads the Three Way Ending data but also the next level “Gangsta’s in Space” DLC level. Kingston really hit it out of the park with this one. As you can see this drive is extremely fast for its class and does act more like more expensive models. By the same token the differences are minor and if you own an already excellent MX200 series drive…we would not sell it to get this one. Of course, with that being said if you are looking at RAID configurations then it would be worth the two hundred dollar investment and using two of these as your D drive and your existing MX200 as a C drive. After all it is only a 2 bill investment we are talking about! Kingston HyperX Savage - Partial and Full Drive Performance While it is important to know how a drive will perform under optimal conditions, more realistic scenarios are just as important. Knowing how drive will behave when partially or even nearly full than when it is empty is very important information to know. To quickly and accurately show this crucial information we have first filled the drive to 50% capacity and re-tested using both synthetic and real world tests. After the completion of this we then re-test at 75% and 90% of full capacity. Synthetic Test Results For our synthetic testing we have opted for our standard VMWare test. Real World Results For a real world application we have opted for our standard Adobe CS6, and Saints Row 3 tests. As expected this drive stays fast and keeps more of its performance than Marvel based units are capable of. PHISON may not be a household name - yet, but if they keep this up we foresee other companies following Kingston's lead and getting on the new Phison performance train! Kingston HyperX Savage - Performance Summary and TL;DR In an effort to make sorting through all the results as easy as possible we have combined the results all of all the test results into an easy to digest summary format. By comparing this drive tosimilar products in all the various tests you will be able to easily find the result(s) you are interested in, see the improvement and decide if this model is worth the investment. Good drive, good price, good performance. The very fact that it is a PHISON controller that has allowed Kingston to offer all that is downright amazing. Color us impressed. Score Card and Summary Performance: 36 out of 40. This drive basically offers mainstream performance levels at an entry level price. To put that another way, there are faster drives available but expect to spend a lot more if you really want to shave a couple percentage points off the time needed. Technological Innovation : 19 out of 20 Kingston took a big risk by opting for PHISON controller…and it paid off big time. Put simply this drive is the epitome of Technological innovation. Or at least is as close to perfect as you will find in the SATA sphere. If it had been a NVMe and not AHCI/SATA controller it really would have been a perfect 20 out of 20. Build Quality & Warranty: 18 out of 20 Togge Mode NAND is some of the best NAND you can find. It is durable, it is fast and it is 'small' enough that even 240GB drives have excellent NAND Interleaving. Mux in a controller that actively ensures data is secure and there is not much to dislike. To be honest if this drive had data protection abilities it would perfect. Value: 19 out of 20 This drive is a fast, it is frugally priced, and even comes in a Bundle Kit option. No matter how you slice it that is one heck of a combination - and one heck of a value. Final Score: 92 out of 100 By thinking outside the box and opting for a relatively unknown controller Kingston has been able to offer consumers a drive that is as powerful as it is frugally priced. No matter if you want to use only one on its own, or two in RAID the HyperX Savage would be an excellent choice for consumers on a tight budget. Kingston HyperX Savage - Closing Statement The Kingston Savage 240GB in specific, and the Savage series in general, is an extremely competent Solid State drive. It certainly may not be as fast as PCIE, M.2, or NVMe based models but for its price range it can easily hold its own against all comers. Quite honestly this level of performance is sure to satisfy most consumers and while you could spend a veritable fortune for higher performing models, the real world differences will be minor at best. More importantly, with an asking price so low, nearly anyone's budget can find room for it. Conversely, consumers who can afford even more expensive models can also choose the Savage and get nearly the same levels but also a better CPU, more RAM, or best of all a faster Video card. This versatility is obviously what Kingston was aiming for and they hit it out of the park. To be blunt when you can not only come in with a lower asking price but equally, and sometimes better, performance than MX200 series consumer have to take note. Even if you have been burned in the past by Kingston and their silent switch of NAND in the V series you should give this Savage a second look. It is their way of apologizing and trying to make things right. Now with all that being the Savage series is not just about offering value and out of the box performance. Instead Kingston is looking to the future and once again pushing the boundaries with outside the box thinking. Much like in the past when they were one of the first to make value a priority, Kingston is making long term performance a priority and in a way that is rather distinctive. Because of the rather unique way of dedicating a core to real time IO requests Kingston is able to offer a drive that actually gets relatively faster the longer you use it. The fact of the matter is, as a drive is used, its NAND becomes dirty and needs to do a lot of internal house-cleaning. This issue is further compounded when the drive is filled up with data as there is less room for house-cleaning. Since almost all consumers actually fill their drive to 75% or more capacity this entry level drive can actually compete against much, much more expensive models and hold its own. Put simply this always stays ahead of these housecleaning duties and it will be bloody difficult to get it into a degraded state. Better still since one core is always dedicated to real time IO requests this house cleaning is nearly seamless - as there is no lag or delay. This is something Marvel and SandForce controllers cannot say. Instead you have to look to NVMe controllers which are just so bloody powerful as to make this issue a non-issue ! In other words if you don’t feel like selling a kidney and your first born to get cutting edge long term performance the Savage should be on your short list. It is for this reason that the Kingston Savage is so cutting edge, and if PHISION ever creates an eight channel version it would quickly vault to the top of the SATA class of drive.

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