The 240 GB HyperX Savage SSD

The 240 GB HyperX Savage SSD looks like an ordinary 2.5" hard disk drive, but on closer inspection, you will notice that it's thinner at just 7 mm, which means it would fit into Ultrabook type notebooks. When you pick it up, you will immediately grasp the biggest physical difference between an SSD and a HDD - the drastic difference in weight. The HyperX Savage weighs less than 100 g while a typical notebook hard disk drive would weight 2.5-3x more.

This is a Serial ATA hard drive, with native support for SATA 6 Gb/s. However, it is backward-compatible so you will have no problem using it with older SATA 3 Gb/s controllers. However, you will not want to use this SSD with anything less than a SATA 6 Gb/s interface because it boasts a maximum transfer rate of 560 MB/s. In fact, the SATA 6 Gb/s interface is barely fast enough to support the HyperX Savage's transfer rate!

Phison PS3110 SSD Controller

The 240 GB HyperX Savage SSD uses a quad-core Phison PS3110 controller, the same SSD controller used in the Corsair Neutron XT. The Phison PS3110 has a rather unique design - it only uses one of its processor cores to service read and write requests while dedicating the remaining three CPU cores to flash management - garbage collection and other background tasks like ECC checking. The aim is to clear "dirty blocks" as quickly as possible, to ensure a steady supply of clean blocks for use. This allows for a much smaller difference in performance (swing) and lower command latencies, particularly when the SSD is full of data.

The three "flash management" cores are also used to periodically read data from the NAND cells and verify their status using ECC. This allows the Phison PS3110 controller to detect and refresh NAND cells with "fading" data before they become unreadable. Phison dubs this very useful feature "SmartRefresh".

The Phison PS3110 controller also features end-to-end data protection using CRC/ECC. This is an enterprise feature that not only protects against soft errors, but also detects and corrects errors between the controller and the NAND flash and DDR3 SDRAM cache. If that's not enough, it even supports Smart ECC, a form of RAID ECC which can reconstruct data with unrecoverable errors!

Finally, the Phison PS3110 controller features hardware support for on-the-fly AES encryption of data written to the SSD. However, it doesn't appear to be activated in the HyperX Savage SSD. Check out the following table for the Phison PS3110's key specifications

Toshiba A19 NAND Flash Memory

The 240 GB HyperX Savage SSD uses the Toshiba A19 NAND flash memory in Kingston 16 GB packages. The Toshiba A19 is a Toggle 2.0 MLC NAND flash memory with a capacity of 8 GB (64 Gbit) per die, manufactured on the 19 nm process technology. This is Toshiba's second-generation 19 nm MLC NAND memory chip, boasting a 17% smaller die size of just 95 mm² and a high transfer rate of 25 MB/s.

HyperX uses 16 NAND packages in the 240 GB Savage SSD, which allows it to not only make full use of all 8 channels in the Phison PS3110 controller, but also interleave two NAND chips per channel. In fact, since each Kingston 16 GB package contains two of these dies, it appears that they are interleaved twice - once at the package level, and once at the channel level. This is how it achieves transfer rates in excess of 500 MB/s with a NAND die that is capable of writing at only 25 MB/s.

The 16 NAND packages also gives it a total capacity of 256 GB. However, only 240 GB is available for use, with 16 GB (6.25%) over-provisioned for garbage collection and bad cell replacement. While this is about the usual over-provisioning level for consumer-grade drives, the unique emphasis on garbage collection by the Phison PS3110 controller should ensure better performance with a full drive than with other SSD controllers.

Nanya DDR3L SDRAM Buffer

The 240 GB HyperX Savage SSD uses a single Nanya NT5CC128M16FP-DI memory chip as a fast memory buffer for write combine and compression operations.

At 256 MB, it is not a particularly large buffer but it is a fast one, with a clock speed of 800 MHz (1.6 GHz DDR) and a transfer rate of 1.6 GB/s. This is also a DDR3L part, which means it uses a lower voltage of 1.35 V, instead of 1.5 V.

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