Kingston HyperX 3K 240GB SSD Review

Inside The HyperX 3K

Security Torx screws hold the case together and are easily removed with the right tools and after breaking the warranty security sticker.

Once open, we find pink bubblegum thermal pads on each side of the PCB to help dissipate excess heat and mitigate physical shock. We don’t see this in a lot of SandForce drives but it was also present in the HyperX we reviewed last year.

On the first side of the PCB lies half of the total NAND flash modules on the drive in the typical configuration.

A zoom in shows Intel 25nm synchronous MLC NAND is the part of choice as it was for the original HyperX we reviewed. The difference here is that these chips are rated for 3,000 PE (program/erase) cycles where as the original HyperX 5K drive featured NAND rated for 5,000 PE cycles. There are sixteen modules in total, each with a density of 16GB giving us 256GB (1GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes) total.

On this side of the PCB, we find the remaining eight flash modules along with the controller.

The big bad SF-2281 controller from SandForce (LSI) is at the heart of the HyperX 3K drive and when configured with quality NAND, can put up some impressive numbers. It’s very adept a wear-leveling, keeping write amplification low, and handling real-time data compression to bolster write speeds. All thanks to its proprietary DuraClass technology. In terms of encryption, we recently found out that these controllers don’t actually support 256-bit AES encryption but rather 128-bit AES encryption.