Introduction

Kingston is the largest memory vendor in the world, so it comes as no surprise that they are also a big player in the solid state storage market.

Their HyperX DDR memory is well known to deliver good performance and overclockability for enthusiasts, which is why the company chose to brand their high-performance SSDs "HyperX". The first HyperX SSD released was the (blue) "Kingston HyperX". Today, we are testing the "Kingston HyperX 3K" using a grey color theme. The HyperX 3K, unlike the older HyperX guaranteeing up to 5K full writes of the disk's capacity on the Intel flash chips, "only" features 3K cycles. The older HyperX model seems to be at the end of its lifecycle, as we had a hard time finding it in stock anywhere. It appears to have been replaced by the HyperX 3K.

Just like its bigger brother, the HyperX 3K uses a SandForce SF-2281 flash controller with the latest firmware.