Kingston HyperX Predator SSD Takes Gumstick M.2 PCIe Drives To 1.4GB/sec 51
MojoKid writes Kingston recently launched their HyperX Predator PCIe SSD that is targeted at performance-minded PC enthusiasts but is much less expensive than enterprise-class PCIe offerings that are currently in market. Kits are available in a couple of capacities and form factors at 240GB and 480GB. All of the drives adhere to the 80mm M.2 2280 "gumstick" form factor and have PCIe 2.0 x4 connections, but are sold both with and without a half-height, half-length adapter card, if you'd like to drop it into a standard PCI Express slot. At the heart of the Kingston HyperX Predator is Marvell's latest 88SS9293 controller. The Marvell 88SS9293 is paired to a gigabyte of DDR3 memory and Toshiba A19 Toggle NAND. The drives are rated for read speeds up to 1.4GB/s and writes of 1GB/s and 130 – 160K random 4K IOPS. In the benchmarks, the 480GB model put up strong numbers. At roughly $1 per GiB, the HyperX Predator is about on par with Intel's faster SSD 750, but unlike Intel's new NVMe solution, the Kingston drive will work in all legacy platforms as well, not just Z97 and X99 boards with a compatible UEFI BIOS.
Wow... (Score:4, Informative)
Most blatant slashvertisment I've ever seen.
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Indeed. Look through the submittor's history though: Similar stories about upcoming product releases of PCIe SSDs from HGST, Intel and Samsung. More interesting is that every story he submits is from hothardware.com - MojoKid is either a very loyal reader, or he works for them.
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Hothotware.com reviews are pretty shitty too. Bog standard benchmark suite, and no mention of critical missing features like OPAL V2 (or eDrive as Microsoft calls it, basically proper encryption support) or how it handles unexpected loss of power in real world conditions.
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Most blatant slashvertisment I've ever seen.
Problem is as a consumer I could care less about the speed of SSD drives. I would like to care about the speed but they've not addressed the major problem: price. $1/GB is just insane in a $0.03/GB world. I need capacity far more than I need speed.
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On the other hand, the smaller they make the nand, the more they can cram on a chip, and the more wear levelling they can do, so the more reliable it becomes.
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Well duh... Did you really think that the SSD makers were targeting 1.4GB/s random read/write devices at making backups?
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Well, except that it isn't a mere month. Unpowered data retention is around 10 years for relatively unworn flash and around 1 year for worn flash. Powered data retention is almost indefinite (doesn't matter if the data is static or not). The modern SSD controller will rewrite blocks as the bits leave the sweet zone.
The main benefit, though, is that SSD wear is essentially based on how much data you've written, which is a very controllable parameter and means, among other things, that even a SSD which has
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That's odd, because Micron gives 1 year un-powered retention warranties on their TLC drives, even when worn.
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I need capacity far more than I need speed.
Your needs are not their target. They target high IOPs environments, like VMware host caching, database transaction tables, etc.
Go buy 10k/15k drives if you want capacity over speed, but with some speed.
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Samsung 850 1 TB drives are about $0.38/GB.
They're not as fast as these drives but it looks to me like flash vendors are kind of inventing a new category of benchmarking stroke artistry around storage.
I can't even begin to imagine what usage advantage is to be gained from some of these over the more traditional SATA SSDs outside of very marginal activities, except for benchmark chasers.
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Saving & loading very large files -- example: video or audio. Personally I work with 1GB audio files, regularly saving and loading them. I would like an SSD faster than the one I have currently.
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Most blatant slashvertisment I've ever seen.
Problem is as a consumer I could care less about the speed of SSD drives. I would like to care about the speed but they've not addressed the major problem: price. $1/GB is just insane in a $0.03/GB world. I need capacity far more than I need speed.
Actually, in the SSD world, that is more like $0.40/GB. So this new low price point is only 2.5 times the existing price point. But then , the speed is about triple.
I don't think I would pay 2.5 times as much for 3 times the speed, but maybe other people would.
If you REALLY don't care about speed and are only interested in capacity, then SSDs should not even be on the radar for you. Look at Hard Drives instead.
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I want an SSD for the basic performance increase over platter drives for many reasons but I'm not going to pay 13 times more per GB for an SSD over a platter drive. They'd have to bring the $/GB of SSDs to under $0.15 for them to be worth switching. As is I'm looking at 10TB of storage minimum for home use.
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Day to day needs I would want 3x2TB SSDs for laptop use, a 2TB SSD external for games run directly off the drive and the remainder could be platters. That would be my ideal situation if SSDs were cheaper. I can't afford that so I've stuck entirely with platters and limiting speed factor on my system is the drives in them... I'm constantly hitting 100% usage for extended periods keeping the systems hanging.
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Why?
If you answer build your own dvr which only represent 5% of users then you need just a fixed long sequencial access. Ah a mechanical disk is up your alley. You don't do random 4k burst dependent on latency. You gain nothing and a mechanical disk is like $60 a tb. So buy some cheap WD green's in a raid and call it a day. Use an ssd for pc use.
1 tb = 2,400 page word document for every man, woman, and child whoever lived! Most consumers never come close to filling 200 gbs. No need.
And there are external dr
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I have 123 games in my Steam library, less than 1/3rd of them are installed due to lack of space on my 1TB platter drive. 90% of the time they can sit on any format of drive and it won't matter, but the other 10% of the time they need performance and they need it right away. They're too large to be continually deleting and re-downloading, so the ideal is to have them on an SSD so they have the performance when they need it.
That's just games not including video rendering applications, audio manipulation, e
I prefer the blatant ads (Score:4, Insightful)
If I can figure out it's an ad from the first sentence of TFS, or better yet from the headline, then that's a massive win. What's annoying is the slashvertisements which masquerade as articles.
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Most blatant slashvertisment I've ever seen.
Well, let's look: ~MojoKid [slashdot.org]
Not a Slashvertisment, merely yet another attempt to drive traffic to a lousy site.
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Just a question, what prevents someone from doing the same thing but with a different site? Isn't anyone free to do this? Maybe MojoKid just likes that site and is that a problem?
Yes, But Does The Logo Have Flames? (Score:5, Funny)
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A couple of extra Xs would also be good
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And they need to be at least big enough to obstruct an adjacent expansion slot.
Why trust them? (Score:5, Insightful)
http://www.extremetech.com/ext... [extremetech.com]
Re:Why trust them? (Score:4, Insightful)
They also want proof of purchase to RMA devices with lifetime warranties, like flash memory. Up theirs. If I wanted theft protection I'd register ownership.
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Mod parent up. Kingston should be dissolved after this total lack of integrity.
Mutlibay chassis (Score:2)
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They interface directly to the PCI-E. No storage controller in between. For maximum performance - few SATA or SAS controllers could keep up with a high-end SSD. A 'multibay drive chassis' is just to fit as many PCIE-M2 converters as you have PCIE slots.
It still uses the AHCI bodge - think of it as a 'fake' SATA controller that gives the OS something supported to boot from. Some drives on PCI-E use NVMe which is even higher performance, but not this one, because not all common OSs support it.
Holy crap, that marketing spin (Score:3)
"unlike Intel's new NVMe solution, the Kingston drive will work in all legacy platforms as well, not just Z97 and X99 boards with a compatible UEFI BIOS."
So it uses AHCI instead of NVMe, and tries to spin this off as a benefit over Intel's drive.
Bull.
Fucking.
SHIT.
AHCI dates back to 2006. It was an improvement over IDE, but it was still designed for spinning rust. No parallel queues, a paltry limit of 32 queued commands, and a design that puts a pretty substantial load on the CPU for each command used. It's something like 14,000 cycles spent in just the driver code for an AHCI command - compare 10,000 for the entire OS stack from fread() to actual bits going over the line for NVMe.
Now, it is true that NVMe isn't fully supported on older motherboards. But that's only boot support - an NVMe drive will work as a data drive on anything running a current OS (Linux 3.3+, Windows 7+). And guess what? Most motherboards that have an M.2 slot* to begin with... are NVMe-compatible. So if you're buying an M.2 drive, you can probably use the NVMe drive. And if you're building a new computer, you'll be getting one that works with NVMe.
Backwards compatibility is important. I'm not saying to discontinue SATA SSDs. But making an M.2 drive that still uses AHCI, then claiming the backwards compatibility as a benefit, is just pure marketing bullshit.
* M.2 is a weird physical interface that can be connected to up to three different interfaces - PCIe, SATA and USB. The USB is only really used for wireless cards, so that leaves PCIe and SATA. Unfortunately motherboards don't have to wire both up to the slot. You can find some cheap motherboards with an M.2 slot that only works with SATA drives. I personally refuse to count those as full M.2 slots. And both Intel's 750 (the NVMe one) and Kingston's drive being advertized here would not work in such a drive, so my point about "if you can put this drive in your computer, you can put a 750 in there and have it work" stands.
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Go to Amazon and search for the Intel drive? $2400 now??! The Kingston is much cheaper oh and I have 950 megs a second from my ahci Samsung pro 80s running on fake raid 0 from intel rst. So speed is still possible as 14000 cpu cycles is nothing when an i7 can do 180,000 instructions a second. Kind of sad that an inefficient design is that poor? Shouldn't we have solved this with an external i/o chip? Or have a component in the cpu? The point of Scsi was for this reason back in the 1990s
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Uh, you sure you were searching for the Intel 750? Because Amazon lists it for $471 for the 400GB model [amazon.com], or $1200 for the 1200GB model [amazon.com]. Which is quite a bit inflated from NewEgg's pricing [newegg.com] but not exactly the $2400 you listed.
Oh wait, I should have read the rest of your post first. You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, do you?
Puulease... Kingston? Really? (Score:3)
Author must not know the difference between the real the rebrand. I would never buy Kingston anything. They just slap random components into those boards. There are hundreds of rebranders in the SSD space but only a handful of real companies. Kingston isn't one of them.
-Matt
No (Score:5, Insightful)
Stop calling these things "gumstick". It's not going to happen. Stop trying to make it happen. They're considerably larger than a stick of gum, are not chewy or delicious, and you're a piece of shit for trying to make that term stick. /vertisement through and through.
Further, who cares? 1.4 GB/sec is nothing noteworthy. This is a
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You broke a tooth, didn't you?
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Stop calling these things "gumstick".... you're a piece of shit for trying to make that term stick.
I see what you did there. In fact, I'm having a hard time removing that thought from under my desk.
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Heck, it turned me on to the Intel 750! Kingston, meh. A new (to me at least) fast Intel SSD? Bring it on -- can't wait to buy one!
pretty dumb (Score:2)
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There are plenty of desktops with M.2 slots.