Kingston HyperX Predator 480GB PCI-Express Solid State Drive Review

HyperX Predator Solid State Drive Overview
As I mentioned you can either get the Predator Solid State Drive with the adapter or as a single M.2 device. The drive is currently available in 240 GB and 480 GB versions, with a 960 GB version coming in Q3 of 2015. We received the 480 GB version that comes in the PCI-Express adapter.

Kingston HyperX Predator PCI-Express Solid State Drive

As you can see the adapter is a simple PCI-Express card with an M.2 slot on it. The Predator solid state drive is of course installed in this slot. Kingston has made the PCB a very nice matte black and has done the PCI-Express traces in gold. Also there is a HyperX logo in the top right. Kingston also includes a low-profile slot cover if you need something smaller than the full-size slot cover.

Kingston HyperX Predator PCI-Express Solid State Drive

You can easily remove the M.2 drive by simply taking out a single screw, much like you would on a motherboard. To our knowledge if you remove the drive from the adapter you will NOT void your warranty. The front of the drive has a large HyperX Predator sticker on it and a second sticker that has all of serial number and other information on it. Under these sticker is the actual controller and NAND. The drive makes use of the Marvell 88SS9293 PCI-Express 2.0 x4 controller. This is Marvell’s latest controller offering.

Kingston HyperX Predator PCI-Express Solid State Drive

Flipping the drive over we can actually see the NAND chips. There are four on this side and four more on the side with the stickers. These are Toshiba A19 toggle NAND chips with the model number of TH58TEG8DDKBA8H. Each of these chips are 64 GB, so eight of them equals 512 GB. You will also notice a small Kingston chip, this is a 512 MB 1600 MHz DDR3 cache chip, there is also another one of these on the opposite side, giving you 1 GB of cache for the controller.

Kingston HyperX Predator PCI-Express Solid State Drive

I also wanted to note that when you remove the M.2 drive from the adapter there is a small thermal pad that helps dissipate heat.

Kingston HyperX Predator PCI-Express Solid State Drive

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