Conclusion:

There is a new breed of SSD on the market that can provide insanely fast transfer rates, and the Kingston HyperX Predator SHPM2280P2H/480G 480GB PCIe M.2 SSD is the first of these to land at Bigbruin.com. With read speeds exceeding 1400MB/s, and write speeds in excess of 1000MB/s, this drive is definitely fast. While some of the other drives used in this review are older and not nearly as high end - the point of reference is very good for those considering an upgrade. It shows just how far things have come in a few years, and just what kind of performance increase a user could expect by upgrading to the HyperX Predator.



Keep in mind that this level of performance is in part made possible by the x4 PCIe connection. If you have a native M.2 slot on your motherboard, make sure it has four PCIe lanes available to it or you will not see results like this. As mentioned before X99 board owners should be good to go, but it would be best to either check your board's specifications first, or to take the Predator with the adapter card.

The Bigbruin.com shopping engine shows that Amazon.com carries the 480GB HyperX Predator for about $515. While the price of SSDs in general has come down tremendously, this is a whole different animal. Getting something for under fifty cents per GB is a decent target price for some very nice SSDs, but here we are at about $1.07 per GB. This isn't a bad price/GB ratio for something like this, it is just that such a high capacity drive is clearly going to be pricey. For reference, the 240GB version of this drive sells for about $297 (or roughly $1.24/GB).

With performance like this, the Kingston HyperX Predator SHPM2280P2H/480G 480GB PCIe M.2 SSD has to earn the Bigbruin.com "Highly Recommended" award.



Pros:

» Incredible read and write speeds
» Use it in a PCIe slot with the adapter or in a native M.2 slot

Cons:

» Pricey

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