Kingston HyperX 3K 120 GB

Kingston HyperX 3K 120GB review

Where once the SSD was the preserve of enthusiasts with deep pockets, these days there are so many drives to choose from that the struggle to get them out to the market at a competitive price has become especially cut throat. As prices continue their slow downward fall, the 120/128GB capacity has become the sweet spot, so much so that at these capacities the magic 1 per gigabyte barrier has at last been broken for SSDs. And that's been a long time coming. To try and leverage a better price point for the HyperX 3K series, Kingston has used 3K NAND memory (hence the 3K tag) instead of the 5K NAND of the original HyperX drives. The 3K label means the NAND should last up to 3,000 full writes of the new drive's maximum capacity versus the 5,000 full writes of the original HyperX. Because of this the NAND is less expensive helping to drive the price down while retaining the pace you expect of a drive carrying the HyperX branding. Kingston quote sequential read/write figures of 555MB/s and 510MB/s respectively for the drive, confirmed by a quick bash through the ATTO benchmark.