HyperX Predator 240GB M.2 PCIe SSD Review

Sandra is a software collection of synthetic benchmarks that will give us a basic idea as to what a system is capable of. It should be noted that SiSoft numbers can change depending on what hardware is being tested.  These were recorded using Sandra Professional Version 21.15.2015.1

ATTO Disk Benchmark is a freeware disk benchmarking utility that can test a variety of storage solutions from single hard drives to multi level RAID arrays and solid state disks.  The tests can be broken down to transfer sizes between 512B to 64MB with lengths between 64KB and 32GB.  Testing results are shown on a transfer chart with reads and writes clearly marked.

For our benchmark the 64MB transfer is being recorded.

Crystal Disk Mark is a widely available disk benchmarking program that can test a variety of different scenarios from Sequential to Random with Multiple and Single queues.

For our tests the Sequential and Random test with multiple queues and threads will be recorded.

PCMark 8 is an overall system benchmark to measure and compare PC performance using real-world tasks and applications. There are six individual testing scenarios using applications that reflect typical PC use in the home and at the office.  This approach ensures that PCMark measures the things that matter, highlighting performance differences that will be apparent to end users and consumers.

SYSmark 2014 ver 1.5 is an application-based benchmark that reflects usage patterns of business users in the areas of office productivity, media creation, and data/financial analysis and features the latest and most popular applications from each of their respective fields.    

We have some interesting results here.  At first we can see why PCI Express drives are so popular among enthusiasts, they are blazing fast and don’t have speed limitations of traditional SATA drives.  The 1.4GB/s Read speeds are perfect for loading applications and even help shave time on a windows boot sequence.  It was surprising to see that Writes were not much faster over the SATA drive and considerably slower than the 1GB/s claimed by the Marvell controller.

Crystal Disk Mark helps explain the speed differences showing the Sequential Reads were super fast however, when it came to Radom Reads the performance dropped off considerably with even slower writes.

The real surprise comes with the real world benchmarks using PCMark 8 and SYSmark 2014.  You would expect to see higher performance however in both instances the scores are completely flat indicating that these tests either put little weight on overall storage performance or are testing using the more realistic “Random” Read/Write model.

Either way the Predator drive has its advantages and is still super fast in certain situations.