Kingston’s solid state drives have been rather popular among the budget conscious and performance demanding PC builders, I remembered a few years back when I got my first entry-level Kingston V300 SSD at an affordable RM380 price tag, I was totally spoilt with its performance for the value I paid for, as the retail shop salesperson also explained to me, any solid state drives will definitely make your PC faster if you come from a mechanical hard drive. Kingston has sent me the HyperX Savage, a handsome looking SSD that will look pretty cool in any gaming rig, but is it any good despite having good looks? We find out.
Hardware and Design
The HyperX Savage SSD features a rather slim 7mm aluminum chassis and that means you can easily install into any laptops, if your PC case doesn’t have a dedicated SSD slot, Kingston has been rather kind to include a 3.5-inch bracket in the package so you do not need to purchase it separately.
The HyperX Savage SSD has one of the most premium looking designs I’ve ever seen on solid state drive, the main surface has a HyperX brand styling in red with the HyperX word etched in silver on top of it, at times I wished I could actually apply luminance stickers on the HyperX word to make it glow beautifully in the dark, otherwise Kingston should probably consider its future SSDs to have LED lighting just like RAMs.
Benchmark and Test Results
As a HyperX branded product, you shouldn’t expect the SSD to be a slouch in terms of performance, well its an SSD alright and it should be fast enough to make any PC run fast, Kingston has however packed the HyperX Savage SSD with a quad-core, 8-channel Phison S10 controller that will deliver sequential read and write speeds up to 560MB/s and 530MB/s respectively, which is a decent speed for a high performance SSD.
Test Bench Specifications
CPU: Intel Core i7-4790K 4.4GHz
RAM: Kingston HyperX DDR3-1866 8GB x 2
Motherboard: ASUS Sabertooth Z97 Mark I
Storage: Kingston HyperX Predator 240GB PCI-E SSD/Western Digital Blue 1TB 7200RPM
Chassis: CoolerMaster Test Bench v1.0
PSU: CoolerMaster G750M Modular
Operating System: Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
On CrystalDiskMark, the HyperX Savage SSD performed brilliantly in both single and multi threaded tests, sequential read and write speeds are equal to Kingston’s marketed performance and it will do better in small file transfers when compared to drives like the Plextor M6s and Apacer AS720. On the other hand, the HyperX Savage shows very similar readings on ATTO Disk Benchmark and it demonstrates pretty decent IOPS that can be considered as a very responsive SSD.
Last but not the least, I tried copying an 8GB MKV video file from the HyperX Predator PCI-E SSD to the HyperX Savage SSD, considering that it has a rather fast 1GB/s write speed in the beginning and eventually ended up in a consistent 480-490MB/s write speed, we can conclude that the benchmarks do not show any discrepancies between real world performance.