INTRODUCTION

   Seven to eight years ago enthusiasts, professionals and hardcore gamers who decided to trust a brand new and revolutionary storage technology called solid state drives only had products from a handful of manufacturers to choose from including Intel, Micron, SanDisk, Kingston, OCZ and Corsair. Of course by then SSD technology had been in the works and evolving for much longer (over a decade actually) but it wasn't until 2007 that it made its first "shy" steps in the consumer market and thus was available to the masses at quite reasonable prices. Today there are literally hundreds of SSD manufacturers (most are OEM ones) around but it's always preferable to pick a model by one of the first ones to jump in the SSD wagon and since Kingston just released the latest addition in their HyperX line called the Savage we decided to take a look and see how it does.

   Kingston Technology Company, Inc. is the world’s largest independent manufacturer of memory products. Kingston designs, manufactures and distributes memory products for desktops, laptops, servers, printers, and Flash memory products for PDAs, mobile phones, digital cameras, and MP3 players. Through its global network of subsidiaries and affiliates, Kingston has manufacturing facilities in California, Taiwan, China and sales representatives in the United States, Canada, Europe, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, Australia, New Zealand, India, Taiwan, China, and Latin America.

   For the HyperX Savage model Kingston took a similar path like Patriot and their Ignite series so once again under the hood we find a Phison PS3110-S10 quad-core, eight channel controller paired with Toshiba’s A19 Toggle Mode NAND flash however (Patriot used Micron ones). We have established quite a few times in the past that the S10 controller by Phison may not be the fastest one in the market currently (it does however offer performance levels of up to 560MB/s read and 530MB/s write) but it does offer a good feature set including enterprise grade end-to-end data path protection, built-in dynamic and static wear-leveling, AES-256 encryption, Smart ECC (via BCH ECC) and DevSleep (power saving). The HyperX Savage line of SSDs by Kingston is currently available in 120GB, 240GB, 480GB and 960GB capacities (with us we have the 240GB model) and is covered by a 3 year warranty.