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Kingston HyperX Predator SSD Takes Gumstick M.2 PCIe Drives To 1.4GB/sec
MojoKid writes Kingston recently launched their HyperX Predator PCIe SSD that is targeted at performance-minded PC enthusiasts but is much less expensive than enterprise-class PCIe offerings that are currently in market. Kits are available in a couple of capacities and form factors at 240GB and 480GB. All of the drives adhere to the 80mm M.2 2280 "gumstick" form factor and have PCIe 2.0 x4 connections, but are sold both with and without a half-height, half-length adapter card, if you'd like to drop it into a standard PCI Express slot. At the heart of the Kingston HyperX Predator is Marvell's latest 88SS9293 controller. The Marvell 88SS9293 is paired to a gigabyte of DDR3 memory and Toshiba A19 Toggle NAND. The drives are rated for read speeds up to 1.4GB/s and writes of 1GB/s and 130 – 160K random 4K IOPS. In the benchmarks, the 480GB model put up strong numbers. At roughly $1 per GiB, the HyperX Predator is about on par with Intel's faster SSD 750, but unlike Intel's new NVMe solution, the Kingston drive will work in all legacy platforms as well, not just Z97 and X99 boards with a compatible UEFI BIOS.
Most blatant slashvertisment I've ever seen.
I'm sure it must be pretty damn good since it has "HyperX" and "Predator" in the name, which is always an indication of high quality and reliability. But I can't be absolutely sure it's the absolute best unless it has flames on the logo.
After their bait and switch with SSD's, how can anyone trust them or the reviews?
http://www.extremetech.com/ext...
If I can figure out it's an ad from the first sentence of TFS, or better yet from the headline, then that's a massive win. What's annoying is the slashvertisements which masquerade as articles.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Does anyone know of a mutlibay drive chassis for this form factor? It would be interesting to make an array of these.
"unlike Intel's new NVMe solution, the Kingston drive will work in all legacy platforms as well, not just Z97 and X99 boards with a compatible UEFI BIOS."
So it uses AHCI instead of NVMe, and tries to spin this off as a benefit over Intel's drive.
Bull.
Fucking.
SHIT.
AHCI dates back to 2006. It was an improvement over IDE, but it was still designed for spinning rust. No parallel queues, a paltry limit of 32 queued commands, and a design that puts a pretty substantial load on the CPU for each command used. It's something like 14,000 cycles spent in just the driver code for an AHCI command - compare 10,000 for the entire OS stack from fread() to actual bits going over the line for NVMe.
Now, it is true that NVMe isn't fully supported on older motherboards. But that's only boot support - an NVMe drive will work as a data drive on anything running a current OS (Linux 3.3+, Windows 7+). And guess what? Most motherboards that have an M.2 slot* to begin with... are NVMe-compatible. So if you're buying an M.2 drive, you can probably use the NVMe drive. And if you're building a new computer, you'll be getting one that works with NVMe.
Backwards compatibility is important. I'm not saying to discontinue SATA SSDs. But making an M.2 drive that still uses AHCI, then claiming the backwards compatibility as a benefit, is just pure marketing bullshit.
* M.2 is a weird physical interface that can be connected to up to three different interfaces - PCIe, SATA and USB. The USB is only really used for wireless cards, so that leaves PCIe and SATA. Unfortunately motherboards don't have to wire both up to the slot. You can find some cheap motherboards with an M.2 slot that only works with SATA drives. I personally refuse to count those as full M.2 slots. And both Intel's 750 (the NVMe one) and Kingston's drive being advertized here would not work in such a drive, so my point about "if you can put this drive in your computer, you can put a 750 in there and have it work" stands.
Author must not know the difference between the real the rebrand. I would never buy Kingston anything. They just slap random components into those boards. There are hundreds of rebranders in the SSD space but only a handful of real companies. Kingston isn't one of them.
-Matt
Stop calling these things "gumstick". It's not going to happen. Stop trying to make it happen. They're considerably larger than a stick of gum, are not chewy or delicious, and you're a piece of shit for trying to make that term stick. /vertisement through and through.
Further, who cares? 1.4 GB/sec is nothing noteworthy. This is a
something to consider but not sure: the i7-4770K is listed as having "only" 5 GT/sec.
so this is enough to push the limit of the kingston IF it is the only thing taxing the PCI-E bus but i think 5 GT/sec is not enough IF one needs the full speed of the SSD AND at the same time trying to push a modern 16 x PCI-E connected GPU thru the i7-4770K?
maybe a test like stream data from SSD to memory and some simple GPU calculation on that and pushing that back to the SSD? could the 5GT/sec be taxed?
faster off-line storage is always welcome though : )
This drive is NOT NVMe, and its not even PCI 3.0, if you are interested in newest fastest search for the new Intel 750 PCIe 3.0 4x and the new Samsung 951 in its newest NVMe form coming soon. But works best with x99 mobo to be bootable as C
The #1 feature of a half gumstick-sized SSD was that you could add two drives to a laptop with an empty WAN or Bluetooth slot. These twice as long drives don't fit in any laptop I've ever seen. So why even bother? Solder the chips directly to the PCI-E card. It's not fitting in anything but a desktop. Either that or just don't try to make drives that big and make an ultra-fast medium capacity drive for laptops so I can add a 1Tb 2.5" drive to the normal bay and have the perfect laptop.