Photos and Breakdown
One of the things I really liked about the HyperX drives is unlike a lot of drives they make sure to get them a little style. It doesn’t improve the performance at all, but when you are building a new rig and you spend time making sure everything goes together a little style on the SSD is nice. Past HyperX SSDs were in black and before that blue but this time around they went with the same red that they used on their HyperX Savage memory kit. Around that red the drive has a little rubber on it then the HyperX logo and two arrows are machined into the top of the drive.
In the black rubber area they also slipped in the Savage branding, it is subtle but visible when you look for it.
The drive is 7mm thick meaning it supports the ultra-thin applications like Ultrabook and other small devices.
On the back things are a lot simpler. Here we have a basic black back with a small white sticker with all of the needed information. You have all of the CE and FCC logos along with the drive capacity, serial number, and model number. For mounting options you get the standard four mounting screws on the bottom as well as four on the sides of the Savage. In addition to that our upgrade kit came with a 2.5 to 3.5 adapter plate on the off chance your case doesn’t have 2.5 inch drive bay support.
So when it came time to dig into the Savage I ran into a problem. Kingston went with security torx screws and while I have plenty of torx screwdrivers I didn’t have this size in a security torx. With this launch coming up our Kingston rep was king enough to pull apart a brand new drive at the office for us to get us photos of the PCB. So when we get inside what do we have? Well the Phison S10 controller comes with a large thermal pad to help pull the heat out into the casing to keep things cool. This is the same controller that I reviewed on the Mushkin Striker and the Patriot Ignite and in both cases I was very happy with their performance. The S10 also has the end to end data path protection that helps prevent dataloss before the data is hardened in the NAND and Smart ECC to recover uncorrectable errors.
Unlike the other two S10 drives this SSD uses a full length SSD to help hold all of the NAND that they packed on the PCB. On the back side we have 8 chips and on the front (controller side) we have another eight. The NAND is Kingston branded but they really are Toshiba A19 64Gbit MLC NAND flash. For this capacity SSD they are using 16GB chips that total up to 256GB. The drive is advertised as a 240GB and when formatted you will actually see 223GB. That means the drive is over provisioned to offer a bit of a buffer later. For the buffer Kingston is using a 256MB Nanya 1600 MHz chip.
