The Kingston HyperX Fury RGB SSD Review: Bright Idea, Dimmed Performance

AnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer

The Destroyer is an extremely long test replicating the access patterns of very IO-intensive desktop usage. A detailed breakdown can be found in this article. Like real-world usage, the drives do get the occasional break that allows for some background garbage collection and flushing caches, but those idle times are limited to 25ms so that it doesn't take all week to run the test. These AnandTech Storage Bench (ATSB) tests do not involve running the actual applications that generated the workloads, so the scores are relatively insensitive to changes in CPU performance and RAM from our new testbed, but the jump to a newer version of Windows and the newer storage drivers can have an impact.

We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, the average latency of the I/O operations, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.

The HyperX Fury RGB's average data rate on The Destroyer is 23% slower than the Crucial MX500 and is also clearly slower than the Plextor M8V that uses the same Toshiba 64-layer 3D NAND. The Fury RGB is not delivering the performance expected from a mainstream SATA drive, let alone one with enthusiast pricing.

The average latency of the Fury RGB on The Destroyer is tied with the Plextor M8V and the 99th percentile latency is better, so Kingston has managed to get decent performance out of the Toshiba 3D TLC in at least some respects, but the Crucial drive is still clearly much better off.

The average read latency of the Fury RGB is slightly worse than the Plextor M8V while the average write latency is slightly better, but neither drive can get the Toshiba TLC to match the performance of the Micron TLC in the Crucial MX500.

The 99th percentile read latency of the Fury RGB falls between the MX500 and the M8V and is nothing to complain about. The 99th percentile write latency surprises with a substantial advantage over the other SATA drives and even the ADATA SX8200, so Kingston's firmware for the Fury RGB is doing a good job at limiting worst-case performance stalls.

When ignoring the energy used for the LED lighting, the HyperX Fury RGB requires a similar amount of energy to complete The Destroyer as other SATA drives, despite taking a bit longer overall. The LEDs were responsible for almost 2/3 the total energy usage by the drive.