Kingston’s HyperX and VNow 200 SSDs turn up the heat on the Hard Disk Drive
Conclusion
As we concluded last year, SSD technology is still one of the most rapidly improving while their price is dropping. With more and more motherboard manufacturers offering SATA 3 6Gb/s ports, the ceiling for maximum transfer speeds for disk drives has been nearly doubled from the SATA 2 3Gb/s standard. We have seen the SSD develop improved new controllers that bring faster speeds – especially with the HyperX Kingston drives.
We have watched SSD technology also get slowly cheaper over time and it is much more accessible to the regular consumer and not just for enthusiasts. Since last year’s Thailand floods which crippled HDD production, SSDs have reached the $1-per-gigabyte MSRP pricing regularly and sales frequently go well below this pricing once considered breakthrough. The Kingston SSDNow V200 series offers a good bang-for-buck for consumers at regular pricing and for less than $95 you can have a fast 128GB drive. At $210, the 256GB version offers a bit less bang-for-buck.
We have to say that we were completely impressed with the HyperX 3K SSD. At $175, it is just as fast as the premium $412 HyperX SSD and $35 cheaper than the slightly higher capacity Vnow 200 drive – 240GB vs. 256GB. Unless you are capacity constrained and the extra 16GB makes a difference, we would recommend the HyperX 3K SSD.
It is absolutely not “mandatory” to have a SSD if you use your PC only for gaming. A hardcore gamer would more likely save his money by buying a large fast mechanical drive and upgrading his graphics instead. A 1TB drive can again be had for $50 on sale. Mechanical HDDs have got quite fast for gaming and their only disadvantage compared to the SSD is waiting a second or two longer for your autosave to load; or longer for an entire level to load. However, if a gamer is impatient and wants to get right back into the game, then the SSD will definitely improve immersion and decrease frustration.
It is a matter of valuing ones time compared to what one spends on a relatively small-capacity drive; one has to choose their games and applications to put on the SSD wisely – Less than 80GB after an OS installation with a 96GB SSD or 119GB for a 128GB drive is not a lot of space and you can only have a few modern games on your SSD at any one time.
With a low-capicity drive SSD , gamers will constantly be installing new games and uninstalling them after playing them to make room for even newer games. At 240GB to 256GB, many gamers will be satisfied with the amount of storage and it is a good compromise size for a budget conscious gamer with $200 to spend on an SSD.
Pros –
- The SSD is of a magnitude faster generally than the mechanical hard drive in almost every way. Windows startup is blazing fast and shutdown is noticeably quicker!
- Kingston’s SSDNow V200 128GB drive has improved over the previous V100 series and it is good bang for buck at $99 for 128GB for a standalone drive
- Kingston’s HyperX 3K SSD has awesome bang-for-buck at Amazon’s current price of $175 for 240GB of really fast HyperX performance. There is no performance disadvantage picking the 3K NAND to save well over $200 off the regular 240GB HyperX SSD’s price.
- TRIM support and garbage collection keeps your drive “like new”. The HyperX SSDs also offer advanced wear-leveling technology, S.M.A.R.T. tools and DuraClass Technology.
- Excellent bundle for notebook or desktop in a single package makes setting up your SSD a breeze and less complex than choosing the bundle for the 128GB (non +) series. Standalone offers a good option.
- 3-year warranty and superb Kingston support stand it out from the “SSD crowd”
Cons –
- Price per GB is still high compared to mechanical hard drives.
- Limited storage compared to HDDs
- 128GB is too small for a hardcore gamer; 240-256GB makes a difference to a gamer
The 240GB Kingston HyperX 3K SSD deserves the ABT Great Value award. It is a good drive for gamers because of its reasonable 240GB capacity, there is plenty of room for Windows, applications and perhaps ten or more of your favorite games. It is also highly recommended as a time and frustration saver in starting up and shutting down Windows and for anything to do with file access, copying, or loading game levels.
We did not set out especially to evaluate our 500GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 drives. However, they continue to performe admirably and demonstrate improvements in every way over our older 7200.10 drives. We even filled our drives to capacity as we tested over 80 games for our original 3D Vision evaluation, and they still perform as they did over a year ago when they were less than half-filled! They are awesome for storage and we will probably upgrade them to 1TB drives.
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Mark Poppin
ABT Senior Editor
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