Kingston Taps Phison For New HyperX Savage SSDs

Kingston announced the new HyperX Savage SSD that the company first displayed at CES 2015. The HyperX Savage product line now consists of both premium RAM and SSD products, just like the HyperX Fury product line. The Savage-branded products all use anodized red housings, allowing system builders to carry over a uniform color scheme in a system build.

The new HyperX Savage SSD utilizes Phison's flagship PS3110 (S10) 8-channel premium controller. The S10 has several features previously found in many enterprise SSD products, such as end-to-end data protection. The advanced features are possible thanks to the controller design that uses four cores. A number of companies have already released S10-based products this year including Mushkin, Patriot, and Corsair.

So far in our testing, no two products have been identical. We recently published a review of the Patriot Ignite that ships with Micron 16 nm asynchronous MLC NAND flash. Corsair went the other direction and utilized Toshiba A19 Toggle flash in the Neutron XT. Phison built the S10 controller with advanced BCH error correction for future use with 3-bit per cell (TLC) NAND flash as well as MLC for both client and enterprise solid state storage products.

We recently spoke with Phison about the S10's future in the market and the progression of firmware. The S10 is already a competitive product with mainstream SSDs on the market, but the company is working on a new firmware that will increase performance even further. The current timeline for the performance firmware is June.

The HyperX Savage comes in four capacity sizes ranging from 120 GB to 960 GB. The company also prepared two product SKUs for each capacity size. The first is a drive-only version with a limited accessory package. Kingston also offers the HyperX Savage in an upgrade bundle that ships with an external USB 3.0 enclosure and Acronis True Image for easier duplication of existing data to the new SSD.

Kingston's HyperX Savage documentation specs sequential read performance at up to 560 MB/s and sequential writes up to 530 MB/s. Just as impressive are the endurance levels. The 960 GB model comes with an endurance rating of 681 TB. Sadly, the warranty terms are only three years, though.

We have a 240 GB model under test now and expect to have the review online next week.

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