Conclusion

The 240 GB HyperX Savage SSD from Kingston Technology is a really interesting drive. It pairs the Phison PS3110 SSD controller with second-generation Toshiba A19 NAND flash memory chips to deliver throughputs in excess of 500 MB/s. The other mainstream SSD to use the Phison PS3110 is the Corsair Neutron XT.

Phison is actually a pioneer in NAND controllers, being the first in the world to develop the USB flash memory system-on-a-chip and thereafter, the world's first single-chip USB flash drive, which they dubbed the "Pen Drive".

That expertise did not seem to translate well into their SSD controllers, which have only been used in budget-grade drives in the past due to poor performance. However, Phison appears to have shaken things up with their PS3110 controller, which takes a completely different approach in improving performance and reliability.

It is a quad-core design with a big difference - three of those cores are exclusively used for flash management. This allows the PS3110 to perform garbage collection more aggressively, ensuring a steady supply of clean blocks even when the drive is filled with data. As a result, the HyperX Savage does not perform as well in single operations but does better at multiple, simultaneous operations.

The HyperX Savage also features a highly interleaved NAND design - once at the package level and once at the channel level. Coupled with a highly parallelised 8-channel controller, this has resulted in truly phenomenal read and write speeds with large chunks of data, at the expense of small reads and writes.

While we often think only of SSD in performance terms, let us not forget the importance of data integrity. In this regard, it's important for us to note that the HyperX Savage offers end-to-end protection of the data using CRC/ECC, as well as RAID ECC to reconstruct data that cannot be recovered through CRC/ECC. Finally, it regularly checks and verifies your data and automatically refreshes it to prevent static data from "fading". These are enterprise-level features that many mainstream SSDs do not yet offer.

With all of that in mind, we feel that the 240 GB HyperX Savage SSD deserves our Reviewer's Choice Award. Its combination of high throughput and data protection features makes it a solid state drive to buy.

For the lowest current prices on the HyperX Savage solid state drives, click here!

Support Tech ARP!

If you like our work, you can help support out work by visiting our sponsors, participate in the Tech ARP Forums, or even donate to our fund. Any help you can render is greatly appreciated!

Questions & Comments

Please feel free to post your questions or comments here!