HyperX Savage 240GB SSD Review

IOMeter 4KB Random Performance

Our 4KB random performance test is conducted in the same manner as our sequential tests, but once the drive is conditioned we run our saved random test profile that runs our 4KB test for two minutes without any idle time in between the tests. The queue depth is set to 32 on four workers and the test is begun. To get the benefits from NVMe based drives you must use multiple CPU queues and this is why we are now using four workers for this IOMeter test.

IOPS is the main thing we are looking at in this test scenario and the HyperX Savage 240GB drive is rated at 93,000 IOPS for the 4K Random Read and 89,000 for the 4KB Random Writes. On our properly conditioned drive we hit 92,300 IOPS Read and 65,300 IOPS Write. Our 4K Random Read result was spot on, but our 4K Random Write result was over 26% lower than expect for reasons we were unable to explain.

One thing that we did notice is that Kingston runs IOMeter without pre-conditioning their drives to get the speeds they use for the specifications. We pre-condition all of our drives by using a 128KB, aligned, sequential write workload across the entire drive. Prefilling a drive before testing is considered standard practice in the industry and for some reason the HyperX Savage performs very strangely when the drive is prefilled as you can see in the chart above. We went from having 88,000 IOPS, which is close to the drives rated 4K Random Write IOPS (93,000) to some of the lowest IOPS (2,800) that we have ever seen on an SSD for 4KB performance.

Here is how 4KB Random Writes look on a drive that has been pre-filled after running secure erase and one that has had nothing done to it at various queue depths. The HyperX Savage SSD will more closely resemble the performance of the blue line that was pre-filled with data than the orange line with no writes done to it in the real world.

We looked to see if this was just a 4KB file size issue, but we saw the same exact thing at 16KB, 32KB and 128KB on our random write testing. We sent our full IOMeter logs to Kingston for examination and will update you once we have an answer! Rumor has it that Phison is working on a firmware update that could help fix the issue here. Neither Kingston nor Phison has talked to Legit Reviews about that firmware update though and these drives have been available to purchase for two months.

When it comes to MBps you are looking at 379.2MB/s on the 4KB Random Reads and 267.5MB/s on the 4KB Random writes.

The response times on the HyperX Savage 240GB SATA III SSD were below 2ms for both read and write operations, which is great for a SATA drive.