Kingston HyperX Predator 240GB PCIe Gen2 x4 SSD Discussions | Drop

Free Standard Shipping in the US on orders over $99

Kingston HyperX Predator 240GB PCIe Gen2 x4 SSD

Showing 1 of 32 conversations about:

Kingston HyperX Predator 240GB PCIe Gen2 x4 SSD

Dextron

Jan 5, 2016

If your motherboard doesn't support NVMe this is as good as it gets (without RAID), right?

talonjones

Jan 5, 2016

DextronThis card isnt NVMe so no its not as good as it gets.

RantyDave

Jan 5, 2016

DextronFrom what (little) I've seen, NVMe only really starts to fly under heavily concurrent loads (databases etc). So it doesn't really help the 'consumer' anyway. Intel make much faster PCIe SSD's but they're *much* more expensive.

Vote

Dextron

Jan 6, 2016

talonjonesNVMe requires motheboard support, and only latest gen mobos have it.

Vote

infowolfe

Jan 13, 2016

DextronNVMe is fastest with recent Intel cpus wired directly (bypassing the PCH), but neither Intel cpus or a recent system are a requirement for running NVMe. All NVMe SSDs are PCI-Express, but not all PCI-Express SSDs are NVMe. This PCI-Express SSD is the more compatible (for booting) AHCI, but even the NVMe Intel SSD 750 is bootable on most machines from the last 10 years thanks to NVMe being backwards compatible with AHCI. So, it's not as good as it gets but it's pretty close and certainly the closest you'll get in the HHHL (half height, half length) form factor. Now, being that Kingston included an AHCI OROM means it's the most boot-compatible of available consumer-grade m.2/pci-e SSDs on the market (you can install Windows/OS X/Linux to this device and boot from it).
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/kingston-hyperx-predator-480gb-m2-pcie-ssd,4113.html

infowolfe

Jan 13, 2016

RantyDave @RantyDave: Not exactly correct on either. NVMe, on accelerated platforms, allows for a much lower *access latency* and thus higher IOPS vs non-NVMe, but it was really designed for multiple x4 lane pci-e 3.0 devices per socket (think 4-8 Intel SSD S3x00 devices per system). It was also designed to be backwards compatible so speaks AHCI under the surface, meaning even without an OROM if you've got somewhere else to put your boot/EFI partition you can still boot off of one under most circumstances. The primary reason for NVMe was to get around SATA/SAS controllers and the PCH being the primary sources of access latency and thus throughput bottlenecks when using large quantities of high speed flash/NAND. Intel's SSD 750 (which can be had for <$1/GB) even without utilizing NVMe fully will still rock close to their theoretical max of 2.2GB/s seq read and 900MB/s seq write over "standard" PCIe 3.0 x4 (say on an AMD chipset board for example) and they can still achieve pretty impressive IOPS numbers even on ancient PCIe 1.1 (2.5GT/s or 2Gbit/s or 250MB/s per lane) x4 interfaces where they're limited by to a theoretical max of 1,000MB/s (I see 800-850MB/s on an old Sun X4540: Opteron 2435, 64GB DDR2-667, running a 750 @ PCIe 1.1 x4).
In reality, any single PCIe SSD is going to be faster than a single SATA/SAS SSD and most will outrun 2+ striped SATA/SAS SSDs pretty handily. The neat bit about this particular drop is that it's an AHCI SSD with OROM (bootable), which means in theory you could install and boot Windows XP SP3 on it without having to use a driver disk and without needing special BIOS support. The "consumer" will be seeing an SSD with a theoretical maximum PCIe 2.0 bandwidth of 2GByte/s (4Gbit/s or 500MByte/s per lane * 4 lanes) in each direction... or in this case an SSD that's capable of outrunning 2.5 (striped) Samsung 850 Pros for reads and a little less than 2 for writes. To put that into perspective, your OS likely requires less than 3s of sequential reads from this device to boot (1400MB * 3s ~= 4.2GB).

infowolfe

Jan 13, 2016

Dextron @Dextron, booting from NVMe requires BIOS/UEFI/motherboard support, but to actually use an NVMe device as a non-boot drive nothing special's needed except OS support (and all recent operating systems do support NVMe). To run it at capacity the NVMe device needs to be attached to CPU PCIe lanes (not switched lanes) and the CPU ideally have support built in. Everything Z87 and newer should support NVMe booting and everything Core iX-3XXX (LGA 1155) or higher should be able to supply enough PCIe lanes to support the latest NVMe PCIe 3.0 x4 devices. This thing though, since it's PCIe 2.0 x4 and AHCI, should be supported back past the iX-XXX sequence (LGA 1156/1366) parts.

erwin-lee

Jan 18, 2016

infowolfequote "but even the NVMe Intel SSD 750 is bootable on most machines from the last 10 years thanks to NVMe being backwards compatible with AHCI" sorry just to confirm, are you saying my old AM3+ will be able to boot from Intel 750 SSD?

Vote

infowolfe

Jan 30, 2016

erwin-lee @erwin-lee if your old AM3+ machine has absolutely no other devices in it, I can't guarantee that it'll boot an Intel SSD 750. But if it doesn't, you could easily slip an NVMe-aware bootloader onto a USB stick and boot from that (or put your bootloader on a SATA disk or SSD and point it at your SSD 750). As long as your operating system knows how to speak NVMe which pretty much all of them do by now, you can boot from an Intel SSD 750 (you may need a slipstreamed service pack or driver disk with older versions of Windows, though). If you can boot your OS from an install disk and that install disk recognizes the Intel SSD 750, you can assume that you'll be good to go on the OS support front. If you install the SSD 750 and look in your BIOS/UEFI and see it as a boot option, you're good to go from that direction. If both are true, then your motherboard will be fine booting from the SSD 750 without any other devices capable of booting the machine present.

Vote

View Full Discussion

Company

About Drop Studio Student Discount Privacy Policy Terms of Use Cookie Settings

Drop Refurbished

Like-new products you can trust

Drop Rewards

Get $5 for every 500 points you earn! Learn more

Drop Keyboard Club

Become a member and expand your keycap collection

Collaborate With Us

For Brands & Designers

Support

Contact Community Guidelines Help Center Sitemap

Follow Drop