Gadgetory

hey everyone today we're talking about the new HyperX pci express SSD and this is called the HyperX predator there's actually an MDOT - SSD and MDOT he's been around for a little while it is very common in smaller mobile devices but it's worked its way into some desktops as well including x99 and some high-end z97 systems however MDOT - is not always a usable form factor for SSDs when we're putting them into desktops and there are a few reasons for this that will go into momentarily the HyperX predator drive although it is an MDOT - SSD it actually uses a PCI Express adapter card about this big and it's a half-height half-length adapter card and what we do is plug the m2 SSD into that card it ships already connected if you buy it that way and then plug that into a PCI Express slot so a few things about this device in terms of specifications the HyperX predator SSD is using a Marvel controller the 92-93 controller it is a dual core SSD controller it's effectively akin to a flash processor unit as Alice I used to call it but most other vendors including Samsung and now LSI or Stanford and of course Marvell called a controller and the 92-93 is a dual core unit it is capable of four-lane connection via the PCI Express of bus which bypasses some of the abstraction layers faced by SATA the device is connected by eight channels as most controllers do with the flash module so the eight channels go to different flash modules Kingston is presently using the Toshiba a 19 toggle NAND 4 it's NAND flash but of course that can always change and the a 19 NAND is 64 gigabit it is the present Toshiba generation of NAND for consumer devices and that's what they're using here the HyperX predator ships and two capacities presently 240 gigabytes and 480 gigabytes now if you do the math on this it's actually 512 as most 480 SSDs as all 480 SSDs are but you lose some of the data and you lose that things like over-provisioning which we've explained in the past so the HyperX predator ships at about $1 per getting a little bit lower and you won't see these prices right now but as retailers continue to sell and adopt the drive for retail you will see that the 480 gigabyte model sells for have four hundred seventy dollars to 40 gigabyte models housing the 200s and all that information is available linked in the article in the description below please check that out for more details so talking about device performance that's what everyone cares about here SSDs are both easy and hard to benchmark properly our SSD test methodology has been peer reviewed by Kingston by Samsung and a couple of other vendors by LSI and controller manufacturers it's been peer reviewed and analyzed and they provided feedback for us to make sure we're testing it properly the reason it's easy is because a lot of it can be done using synthetic software we don't have to manually run around in games like we do with GPU testing requires a lot of manual effort with SSDs we can run a lot of software but the hard part is taking all of that information which is very dense and then stripping out the parts that are irrelevant to most users like gamers and production power users like us and then further the challenge we face next is presenting that data in a matter which is actually comprehensible rather than just pasting screenshots of ATT o which is I have trouble understanding that and I look at it health K so that's that's the challenge we face so some things I want to talk about before we get started here I did an intensive study of i/o during games so this used HD tuned to log the i/o transactions made when games were loading and when games were playing and this tells us how many i/o requests were made during each games or each sequence of the game during loading and then it further tells us what type of i/o that is what how long the i/o is so for K 16 K and so on and then we look at the queue depth which is another important factor that's effectively how many files or excuse me how many i/o requests are lined up in sequence to be executed by the device and in the case of gaming we found that queue depth of 1 & 2 are very common and after that it sort of what type of game you're playing with files you're loading in terms of i/o length we learned that for K random of course still very important for K random qd1 especially and then after that the reads and the reads are most popular at 16 K 32k and then the rights are at 16 K and of course for K as I mentioned before some of the higher sized writes occur at 64 K depending on the game and I have all that shown in the charts on the article if you can't catch that through YouTube fast enough we take all this data and then use a mix of benchmarking software like anvils storage utilities to run tests the fitting of those transactions so it's a simulation of gaming but it is a scientifically designed one the problem though is that even with a very high transaction speed we still face issues in the software bottlenecks where you you hit a point of diminishing returns very rapidly and this occurs with the PCI Express device that we're talking about today and all other PCI Express devices in such a fashion that once you put an SSD in a system you really don't you stop seeing any improvement beyond that to your game performance but there's a large improvement to things like workload tasks so Photoshop video editing and premiere After Effects and other software in that effect there's better compression and then of course better file copy and transfer speeds so let's let's get to the benchmarks finally first I want to show you the PC mark performance this is a synthetic utility that executes real-world traces so the developers future mark took traces of applications like Photoshop Premiere Illustrator every Adobe suite program they took traces of some games and of office and then they execute those on the SSD in a fashion that is replicable on all devices without as much test error as if it were being done manually by me so this is why we use that you can see the largest improvement with Photoshop transactions so photo shops execution time of heavy workload batches is about 4% faster than the 850 Pro when using a piece express drive and you'll notice that there are no other PCI Express drives on here right now that's because the HyperX predator is the first one we're testing we hope to look at Intel 750 SSD in short order but do keep in mind that all these competing devices were showing are not necessarily actually competing they're in different price points and they use the SATA interface so the biggest improvement between PCIe and SATA is in Photoshop as seen here and then we can look at file copy speeds so this is a test called a SSD which uses incompressible data that means that the data has already been compressed to a point that windows can an SSD can no further compress it so technologies like sand forces door I really don't play it too well here because they they really they have nothing to do it's already been done for them the files that are incompressible are generally mp3s movies like mp4s and images JPEGs are already very heavily compressed as many of you know so this is considered incompressible data in our incompressible test you can already have seen the numbers now while I've been babbling for a minute and the fastest speed we ever saw with the HyperX PCIe SSD the predator using compressible data was almost 1.4 gigabytes that is tremendous it's extremely fast and no SATA drive can possibly reach that speed because the SATA interface after overhead is about 550 megabytes per second before overheads clocha to 750 but you'll never see that speed because there's all kinds of overhead and abstraction and the transfer our in-house gaming test using anvil storage utilities which you can download for free but we've we've modified with these settings and you can also replicate these we use 67% incompressible data which is fairly realistic to live use and you can see that the HyperX PCIe SSD does excel in many cases and some of them like 4k it's fairly similar or even surpassed by the Samsung 850 Pro no well that as I said before this does not really reflect an in-game improvement so in our heavily modded version of Skyrim which is very large fast travel loading non cell what is a difference of less than a second so between the 850 Pro the HyperX 3k which is slower the OWCA Drive and the predator we see a disparity of less than one second between eight and nine seconds every time to load Whiterun so you will not see a gain in gaming however concluding everything that we've just gone over you will see performance gains in Photoshop swirl ODEs at about four percent from the Samsung 850 pro four percent isn't a lot if you are a production user who is using Photoshop all day whether it's automated or not you may want to consider something like a PCI Express Drive because when you're using it that much four percent can actually be fairly a fairly good result for heavy intensity workloads and file transfers like copy and we see a massive gain more than two times the transfer rate more than three times the transfer rate of a lot of SATA SSDs but beyond that the the performance gains are really at a point where they're unnoticeable and many core user applications so all the speed data aside it's also important to talk about usability you would want a PCIe adapted MDOT two SSD in the case where one your motherboard has no MDOT to support - you're on a z97 board where there actually is a performance disparity between em - and the adapted PCIe version this is something that's been tested in-house by Kingston and other Manek manufacturers excuse me the downsides to using PCI Express are also obvious you consume a PCIe slot so you've suddenly limited your SLI and crossfire capabilities on has well and z97 z87 whatever there is a very limited lane availability so you've got 16 lanes from the CPU and eight from the chip set of at z87 or better and that means you've got about twenty four lanes total exactly 24 lanes and those are divvied up between your MDOT 2 or PCIe SSD and your your video cards so if you have an X 16 video card that 69 is gone immediately if you have another one you're depending on your configuration you could be at 24 or 32 lanes it might be a multiplex board that allows that and beyond that point you really have no room for an SSD so there will be some throttling or limitations in that regard and in that case you would really want an X 99 board which has upwards of 40 lanes available so those are some of the concerns here with solid state drives I want to really emphasize that you need more than speed it's very important to pay attention to endurance at this point endurance is very difficult for us to test in a timely fashion in that it is impossible to test in a timely fashion by the nature of it so we do run a sort of passive endurance tests in the background if we ever find a problem will update but that might be a point at which you've already purchased a device so beyond endurance items to consider would be things like the controller and the NAND used which can be used as an indicator of the endurance and this is all stuff we discussed in the article and full detail if you need help deciding if I have this combination of NAND controller and this manufacturer is it really gonna survive in the long term and then there's things like encryption the 850 Pro is more affordable far more affordable than the HyperX predator and it's got full AES Drive encryption and it has opal compliance and a couple of other business class features that I'm not a hundred censure if the predator offers all of those although the predator is faster so that's your disparity in pricing so that's the full review of the HyperX predator I know it's pretty in-depth but this is our first SSD review we've done a video of so I want to make sure everyone understands how we test and the critical aspects of determining which SSD you should buy please leave a comment below if you're curious about anything we do a lot of SSD content I'll help you out if I can a tweeting at us is really the best thing to do at gamers Nexus on Twitter I respond very quickly on there and thanks for watching I will see you all next time you