HyperX 3K Overview
The HyperX 3K has the same awesome look as the original HyperX drive, except instead of blue accents it has black ones. This is the sure way to tell the 2 drives apart. The center part of the drive is brushed aluminum and has an engraved HyperX logo at the top and a Kingston logo towards the bottom.
Flipping the drive over there is small sticker that has all of your serial numbers and information on the drive. Here you can also see 4 bottom mounting points and 4 screws that can be used to take the drive apart, although Kingston does make it pretty hard. As far as your connections go you have your normal SATA power and data connections. There are also 2 mounting holes on each side of the drive.
To see a more in-depth look at the packaging and design of the drive check out our video below.
As you saw from the video above Kingston has made it pretty hard to get inside of the drive. No worries though we have some internal shots and can tell you what is inside the drive.
Powering the drive is the SandForce SF-2281-VB1 chip. The memory chips are Intel 25nm NAND rated of course for 3000 program / erase cycles. Each NAND chip is 16GB giving the drive a total of 256GB of storage, but it is a 240GB drive as 16GB is used for over-provisioning.
So what’s the deal with the 3K? Kingston is calling this drive the HyperX 3K because the Intel 25nm NAND is rated for 3000 program / erase cycles. The normal HyperX drive has Intel 25nm NAND that is rated for 5000 program / erase cycles. Now you may be thinking that 3000 is not a lot but an average to moderate user will use 1 program / erase cycle a day. That ends up to being a little over 8 years so this drive is going to last you quite a while. The difference between the original HyperX drive and the 3K drive is $70.
