THE HYPERX 3K 240GB

Kingston packs the usual 2.5" USB enclosure with their upgrade bundle kit but although quite convenient and easy to use i still don't understand why they are not using an USB3.0 compatible instead (would make far more sense).

The HyperX 3k model features almost the same brushed aluminum top like the previous HyperX drives. However although the new 3k models feature the same Intel 25nm MLC NAND flash as the original HyperX models this time it's rated for 3.000 p/e cycles instead of 5.000 p/e cycles (used with the previous models). This difference has basically nothing to do (or very little) in terms of performance and will hardly ever affect regular users, however for professional and enterprise use (heavy read/write loads) 3.000 cycles is not what I’d recommended unless of course you can swap SSDs once every couple of years.

Just for the record i placed the new HyperX 3k drive next to the previous HyperX 5k drive and as you can see the only exterior differences are the color and the lack of the red Kingston logo.

As usual the rear sticker includes the drive capacity, certification logos, electrical requirements, serial number, roll-out date, country of manufacture, authenticity stamp and of course the company name.

At the rear end we see the usual SATA III connector and the 4 pins used for firmware upgrades (performed by Kingston).

The 240GB variant of the HyperX 3k features the same high performance SF-2281 controller from SandForce (just like the other HyperX models) and uses a total of 16 Intel 25nm MLC NAND ICs, each 16GB in size.