Kingston HyperX 3K 480 GB SATA III 2.5-Inch 6.0 Gb/s Solid State Drive SH103S3/480G

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Price: $402.74    

Product Feature

• Package includes 2.5-Inch SSD, 3.5-Inch bracket and mounting screws
• 540MB/sec read and 450MB/sec write speeds
• Faster boot times and application loads than hard drives
• No moving mechanical parts gives it longer life and ability to handle rougher conditions
• Backed by Kingston's three year warranty and free technical support
• 2.5-Inch SSD Drive with 9.5mm height
• Support for SATA Rev 3.0

Product Description

Budget-minded gamers and enthusiasts will benefit from the lower price of Kingston's new HyperX 3K SSD. This solid-state drive combines premium 3000 program-erase cycle synchronous NAND with the second-generation SandForce controller. Its lower price means more users can experience ultra-responsive gaming, multitasking and multimedia computing power. 3K loads games and applications faster, increases frames per second (FPS) for an improved gaming experience and allows for quick transfers and edits of large media files. HyperX 3K provides high-speed SATA Rev. 3.0 (6Gb/s) performance and blazing fast random and sequential read/write speeds. SandForce DuraClass technology provides the latest data integrity protection for ultimate endurance over the entire life of the drive. HyperX 3K SSD comes in a sleek, black and aluminum case design, accentuating the look of any power user's system. For added peace of mind, HyperX 3K SSD is backed by a three-year warranty and legendary Kingston reliability.

Kingston HyperX 3K 480 GB SATA III 2.5-Inch 6.0 Gb/s Solid State Drive SH103S3/480G Review

Thank you Amazon for the very quick delivery.

I have been noticing that a lot of SSD vendors ship out their products in nothing more than a hard plastic shell, not Kingston. The Hyper 3k comes packaged with a nice box. The SSD and the 3.5" adapter and screws are held snugly in place by dense foam. As this is a bare drive, there are no software or sata cable provided. However, sata cables are cheap and software to clone your old drive to your new SSD can be downloaded for free from various software companies.

I'm sure you all are aware that SSDs are fast, really fast when compared to HDD. This Hyper 3k is no exception. To maximize the speed of this SSD make sure you run it in AHCI mode and not IDE mode. It is very comparable to my girlfriend's Samsung 830 speedwise. It is also built, in my opinion, a little sturdier than the Samsung. It seems a little heavier and the header where you plug in the power and sata is much, much better than the Samsung. With the Samsung when you try to disconnect the sata cable it almost feel as if the whole header will come off. The Samsung, however, has a much better toolbox called Samsung SSD Magician. The Samsung SSD Magician has features to optimize the OS, to do firmware update, to run benchmark, performance optimization, and secure erase. The Kingston SSD Toolbox, which must downloaded from Kingston website, only gives you Drive and Details. Details is useless, and Drive will tell you the model of your SSD and the firmware that came with your SSD. Kingston, you guys really need to give us a better toolbox. Visually, the toolbox looks like it was designed back in the 90's.

Firmware can not be updated via the Toolbox, you have to go to Kingston website and download it from there. Quite cumbersome. Also in order to update the firmware, you HAVE to be in AHCI mode. If you are in IDE mode, don't panic, there are quite a few tutorials on the web on how to change from IDE to AHCI by in the registry and reboot into bios to enable AHCI.

Good news for Windows 7 users, your SSD will be automatically be 4K aligned. What does that mean? It means you can clone or migrate your OS to the new SSD and not having to worried about doing the 4K alignment yourself.

For cloning my HDD to my Hyper 3k I used to programs, AOMEI partition Assistant 5.1 and Macrium Reflect 5. Both are free programs.
1. Install your SSD in the computer case but don't plug it in to the motherboard yet.

2. Uninstall any programs that you no longer used in your HDD, are haven't used in a long while, which means you are no longer using it:)

3. Defrag your HDD. What you are doing is trying to remove as much data as possible because the content that is left has to fit into
your new SSD.

4. Once it is smaller, launch AOMEI and shrink your drive. For example, you wean down the content of your 1TB drive to 150GB of data. Macrium Reflect will not be able to clone your drive because it still sees 1TB and will give you an error message that your source drive is bigger than you destination drive. With AOMEI you can shrink the PARTITION of you drive to 150GB. There is a tutorial on AOMEI's website. *you will have to reboot after AOMEI shrinks your partition*

5. After the reboot, power down your computer.

6. Plug your SSD to the motherboard with the sata cable and connect the sata power cable from your power supply to the SSD.

7. Turn on your computer and go disk management and initialize the unknown drive (your SSD). Once initialized, Windows will recognize your SSD and assigned a drive letter to it.

8. Launch Macrium reflect and click on clone my drive. It will show your HDD and SSD. All you have to do is drag the partitions down to the SSD. Most people will only have 2 partitions on the HDD.

9. Sit back, relax, this could take 30 minutes or more depending on how much data you have. I only had to clone 73GB so it took only 17 minutes.

10. After it's done, you will need to reboot.

11. Google how to enable AHCI mode and follow the steps (not long and complicated at all).

12. One more reboot and you are done.

Enjoy your new drive:)

Update 11/05/13: After 1 year of usage, this SSD is still as fast as the 1st day I installed it. It has proven to be very reliable. The Kingston HyperX 3K withstood 2 abrupt power failure and a lot, and I mean a lot, of writing cycles as I am constantly moving my steam games back and forth from SSD to my HDD. Toolbox still shows that my SSD's health is still 100%.

The Holiday season is here and if you are looking purchase a SSD for yourself or as a gift for someone else, I recommend that you consider this SSD (if the price is right).

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