Kingston HyperX Predator pcie ssd: fast but not the fastest
Kingston supplies the HyperX Predator in capacities of 240 and 480GB, and does so with or without a pcie card to use the ssds in systems without an m2 slot. We mainly find those slots in motherboards from 2014 and younger. Unfortunately, the Predator is not the fastest SSD you can buy for about 90 cents per gigabyte. For example, you can buy Intel’s more forward-looking NVMe drive, the 750, or Samsung’s 950 Pro, provided you have a Series 9 or X99 motherboard to boot from an NVMe drive.
Pros
- Very fast
- Both m2 and pcie version
Cons
- Duration
At CES in January 2015, Kingston briefly showed the Predator drive, but it wasn’t actually available until April of this year. Kingston supplies the HyperX Predator in capacities of 240 and 480GB, and does so with or without a pcie card to use the ssds in systems without an m2 slot. We mainly find those slots in motherboards from 2014 and younger. We tested the 480GB version of the SSD.
Kingston has used an 88SS9293 controller from Marvell in its Predator, which drives A19nm nand from Toshiba. Thanks to the x4-pcie interface, this should be possible at high speeds; Kingston advertises speeds of 1400MB/s for reading and 1000MB/s for writing. By comparison, the fastest SATA SSDs reach less than 550MB/s for both.
The Predator isn’t the first PCIe SSD we’ve seen, but it’s one of the best drives available, especially for a version with an x4 interface. Samsung’s XP941 drives were among the first PCIe SSDs, but are difficult to obtain due to their OEM status. Samsung has now had it followed by the 950 Pro, Samsung’s first NVMe drive. Plextor’s M6e is reasonably available, but has an x2 interface and therefore a lower maximum speed.
We subjected the drive to our full SSD benchmark protocol, but only present the most important results in this abbreviated review. The other benchmarks can be found in the bench-db . For comparison, we included the x8 pcie drive Revodrive 350 from OCZ, as well as the 950 Pro, Samsung’s x4 pcie nvme drive. We also included the Intel 750, an NVME drive with x4-PCIE interface and a fast SATA drive, the Samsung 850 Evo, as comparison material.
We start with the synthetic benchmarks in the form of AS-SSD. A worst-case scenario is tested with incompressible data. The Intel nvme drive is superior and OCZ’s revodrive also benefits from the extra bandwidth of the x8 interface. The Predator is a lot faster than traditional SSDs with a SATA interface.
traces
We have several traces of the HyperX Predator, the 950 Pro, and Intel’s 750 drive. We have shown in this graph the traces of the Predator under Windows 7 and that of the 750 under Windows 7 with Intel’s nvme driver. We also show the performance of the 950 Pro under Windows 7, with Samsung’s latest beta driver.
If we compare the Predator in the field test, the test we completed with good results, with the four other drives, it turns out to be extremely fast in the traces. On all counts, the Predator is the fastest SSD we’ve tested. Only in the Workstation and Gaming traces is part of the competition faster, but overall the Predator can be bloody fast
Conclusion
The Predator is a lightning fast SSD, but has to recognize its superiority in modern NVME drives. Yet it is more expensive than such drives; the 950 Pro is cheaper and faster. With such NVMe drives you are better prepared for the future, provided you buy a Series 9 or X99 motherboard to be able to boot from an NVMe drive. On an older motherboard it is one of the fastest options, provided you use the optional hhl adapter; after all, older boards don’t have a fast m2 x4 slot.