HyperX Savage 480GB SSD Review, The Savage Vs The Laptop Platter Drive.
We’ve taken a look at the HyperX Savage 240GB and now we have its big brother, the Savage 480GB SSD on the bench. Outfitted with the same quad-core, 8-channel Phison S10 controller as the 240GB drive, it provides speeds up to 560MB/s Read and 530MB/s Write. Found on most current desktops, SATA III’s 6Gbps speed limit is 600MB/s, and for laptops it’s not unusual to find SATA II with 3Gbps of bandwith. Thankfully, many laptop manufacturers are catching onto the SSD revolution quickly.
What we wanted to do is take the Seagate ST9500420AS and the HyperX Savage and hook them up to a desktop, then run both of them in the same laptop. We have several laptops lying around the lab and our high-end Samsung looked good for the testing until we looked at its specifications and found an 8GB cache SSD which might or might not skew our numbers, so we went further into the Bjorn3D well of equipment and came up with a basic, everyday-use laptop. We randomly picked a 16-inch Toshiba Core i3 Wal-Mart $499 special, model number C55-A5311.
We should get some good, realistic numbers using a desktop/laptop setup. To make everything fair, the drive on both the laptop and desktop were cloned to both the platter drive and SSD and they both ran the same files and operating system.
Model SHSS3B7A/240G | |
Form Factor | 2.5″ |
Interface | SATAÂ Rev 3.0 / 6G |
Capacities | 120GB, 240GB, 480GB, 960GB |
Controller | Phison 3110 |
Baseline Performance | |
Compressable (ATTO) | |
120GB | 560MB/s Read and 360MB/s Write |
240, 480, 960 GB | 560MB/s Read and 530MB/s Write |
Incompressible Data Transfer(AS-SSD and CrystalDiskMark) | |
120 GB | 520MB/s Read and 350MB/s Write |
240 GB | 520MB/s Read and 510MB/s Write |
480 GB | 520MB/s Read and 500MB/s Write |
960 GB | 520MB/s Read and 490MB/s Write |
IOMETERÂ Maximum Random 4k Read/Write | |
120Â GB | up to 100,000/up to 84,000 IOPS |
240Â GB | Â up to100,000/ up to 89,000 IOPS |
480 GB | up to 100,000/ up to 88,000 IOPS |
960 GB | up to 99,000/ up to 89,000 IOPS |
Random 4k Read/Write | |
120 GB | up to 93,000/ up to 83,000 IOPS |
240 GB | up to 93,000/ up to 89,000 IOPS |
480 GB | up to 92,000/ up to 89,000 IOPS |
960 GB | up to 97,000/ up to 89,000 IOPS |
PCMARK® Vantage HDD Suite Score | |
120, 240, 480, 960 GB | 84000 |
PCMARK® 8 Storage Bandwidth | |
120GB, 240GB, 480GB | 223MB/s |
960Â GB/s | 260MB/s |
PCMARK® 8 Storage Score | |
120, 240, 480 GB | 4,940 |
960 GB | 4,970 |
Anvil Total Score (Incompressible Workload) | |
120. 240, 480 GB | 4,700 |
960Â GB | 5,000 |
The Kingston HyperX Savage 480GB drive comes with the classic HyperX logo, but if you think a few years back, HyperX had a signature color of blue. We kind of like the bold red and silver design of the drive. Hidden under the red and chrome exterior you find a quad-core, 8 threaded Phison S10 controller that’s setting the SSD world on fire.
Looking at the business end of the HyperX Savage 480GB you find the usual SATA connectors. Being a modern drive, of course it is SATA 6G, and is capable of hitting 560MB/s, offering enthusiast-level performance at mid-level SSD prices.
Here’s our label shot showing that it is in fact a HyperX 480 GB drive, along with the usual certifications and warnings.