INTRODUCTION

   M.2 NVMe SSDs (solid state drives) may offer the highest possible read and write performance currently but thanks to their compatibility with both old and new systems 2.5 inch SATA models still "occupy" a large chunk of the consumer market. On top of compatibility with both new and old systems there's a brand new reason as to why 2.5 inch SATA SSDs will not be going anywhere anytime soon and that's the addition of RGB illumination. Of course, as you're all aware RGB hardware components and gaming peripherals have taken over the PC and console markets and so it was just a matter of time really before we saw RGB illuminated 2.5 inch SATA SSDs (as a matter of fact we're surprised this hasn't spread to 3.5 inch HDDs and external PHDs and SSDs - yet that is). The very first such product to land on our test bench was the DELTA-R RAINBOW RGB model by Teamgroup/T-Force and since many of you seemed to like the concept with us today we have yet another such product the FURY RGB 480GB SSD by HyperX.

   HyperX is the gaming division of Kingston Technology Company, Inc., the world’s largest independent memory manufacturer, with the goal of providing gamers, PC builders, and power users with high-performance components. For 15 years, the HyperX mission has been to develop gaming products for gamers – high-speed memory, solid state drives, headsets, keyboards, mice, USB flash drives, and mouse pads – to the gaming community and beyond. The award-winning HyperX brand has carved its name atop the leaderboard by consistently delivering products that deliver superior comfort, aesthetics, performance, and reliability. HyperX gear is the choice of pro gamers, tech enthusiasts, and overclockers worldwide because it meets the most stringent product specifications and is built with best-in-class components. HyperX has shipped over 3 million headsets worldwide.

   HyperX currently lists the FURY RGB SSD in three different capacities (240/480/960GB) all of which feature an MTBF (meantime between failures) of 1 million hours and are covered by a 3-year limited warranty. Excluding its internal RGB LEDs (compatible with ASUS AURA Sync, Gigabyte RGB Fusion, MSI Mystic Light and ASROCK Polychrome Sync) under the hood of the new FURY RGB SSD we also find a rather familiar configuration which includes the 88SS1074 quad-channel NAND flash controller by Marvell, Toshiba’s 64-layer 3D TLC NAND Flash (3-bits-per-cell technology) memory and 512MB LPDDR3 cache. The Marvell 88SS1074 NAND controller is among the highest selling ones in the industry to date and sports several technologies including SLC cache (pseudo-SLC), partial power loss protection, active garbage collection, redundant array of independent NAND (RAIN), LDPC error correction code (ECC), adaptive thermal protection, data-path protection, multistep data integrity algorithm, full DevSleep (power save) support, TRIM, SMART, AES 256-bit hardware encryption and support for both TCG Opal 2.0 and IEEE-1667 (fully compatible with Microsoft's eDrive and EU's GDPR). Also according to HyperX the 480GB capacity model of the FURY RGB series is verified for a TBW (total bytes written) of up to 240TB (120TB for the 120GB capacity and 480TB for the 960GB capacity).