PC gaming enthusiasts are constantly tinkering away on their monster rigs, trying to squeeze every last frame per second out of them, adding a few more polygons and rounding a few more curves. But one item that is often overlooked in a system upgrade is the hard disk drive. What difference will a new hard drive make to an old system? Well, we’re here to find out.

Solid-state drives are renowned for two things: their incredible speed and incredible prices. Prices have been coming down slowly, but with the recent floods in Thailand this drop has been reversed and prices are in fact on the increase. Performance, on the other hand, has only seen an upward curve to the point where performance is hampered by the type of connection to the rest of the hardware. As faster interfaces become available, so too do faster drives.

I remember back in the days of DOS you could create a RAM disk, which was a drive created in your RAM to allow faster access to vital files. These drives were normally used if your PC had 16mb of RAM or more. How things have changed!

In this review we will be looking at the Kingston HyperX Solid State Drive. I am reviewing its performance in two very different machines. First up we have an old Core 2 Duo PC dedicated to gaming. We also have a Core i7 laptop used for a bit of gaming and some general office work.

In the Core 2 Duo we will be comparing the fast Kingston against the current Samsung spinning disk drive. The Samsung wins on pure capacity to cost, with 1TB of space available for around R1000. However the disk spins at 7200rpm and getting the info off the drive is quite fast, but pales in comparison to the Kingston.

Using SiSoftware Sandra the Samsung averages 62MB per second. This means that it can copy a 100MB file in just over 1.5 seconds. The drive also has a random access time of 13.6ms. For those uninitiated the random access time reflects the amount of time it takes the drive to get the physical head reading the data to the specific area of the spinning disks to read the data. 13.6ms is pretty darn fast when you think about it.

The Kingston, however, spits out some serious numbers. For starters, it can read at a staggering speed of 265MB per second. Where files used to take a few seconds to copy it now takes mere split-seconds. And since it has no moving parts and thus no head that needs to move across a spinning disk, its random access speed is, for all intents and purposes, instantaneous. I had to look up what 24µs is in normal time. 1µs is one micro-second, also known as one millionth of a second. See, instantaneous.

It becomes clear that the motherboard’s interface is in fact the bottleneck here. In order to see what the drive is really capable of I decided to stick it into my work laptop. This laptop has a fiery new Core i7 Quad Core processor in and all the latest interfaces designed to make the most of drives such as this.

The old spinning mechanical disk in the laptop was a 750GB Western Digital drive, and this performed pretty well compared to the Samsung drive. It scored a very solid 74MB per second transfer speed with a respectable 11.8ms random access time. This proved to be quite a bit better than the desktop drive.

But the Kingston proved that I had not seen anything yet!

When paired with the correct hardware this drive simply shines too bright to miss. The random access time was still 24µs, but its transfer speed doubled to 530MB per second. That equates to nearly a whole data CD each second! This is simply astounding, and combining this with a processor able to handle this amount of data becomes essential.

All of these statistics become useless if you do not have real-world use for this sort of performance. In the Core 2 Duo PC the fast Kingston was used as the Steam repository, so all Steam games should load a lot faster than they used to. This was certainly the case!

Games that normally took quite a while to load were now loading a lot quicker. Skyrim was able to load it’s incredibly detailed worlds in mere seconds, making it impossible to read any of the handy tips that are displayed during the loading screens. Battlefield 3 loaded with such speed that the wait for the rounds to start online and in-game (after load) felt much longer than it should have. Maybe EA can change it for me and those suckers with slow drives can start after us? The original Mass Effect had none of the usual texture pop-in that plagued some of the earlier Unreal engine based games. And some even older games like Quake 3 loaded instantly, making for an extremely enjoyable gaming experience.

When the drive was installed in the new laptop, the benefits were even more obvious. Since the laptop can only take a single drive it had to be the OS drive. The first thing you notice when you turn the laptop on is how long it takes to boot up. The mechanical disk took round about a minute to get to the login screen. The Kingston wrapped up the boot process in 17 seconds.

Once logged in, applications loaded a lot quicker

The Kingston also comes with a USB caddie and cable, allowing you to use this drive as a portable drive. Since it has no moving parts the drive is a lot more durable as a portable drive than the traditional mechanical drives. I mentioned earlier how RAM was used to speed up your PC with RAM drives. In the case of the Kingston it can be used as a way to speed up your PC’s RAM by using Microsoft Readyboost. This moves some of the RAM onto the USB drive to speed up it’s seek times.

Moving your swap file onto it your SSD also dramatically improves performance when having multiple applications open at one time.

So, we now know that the Kingston is a seriously fast drive with figures that I am still struggling to comprehend. The potential for even greater speed increases exist and things are looking sunny for PC gamers. Given its current cost, however, gamers will find better results by spending the money on the traditional upgrades: CPU, memory and graphics. These may not speed up the loading times of your games, but once they are running the performance gain will yield greater results.

If you need the ultimate PC gaming rig and if money isn’t a problem, then the Kingston simply must be on the top of your shopping list. I mean, who has the time to read little tips during loading screens anyway?

The Kingston is by far the best hard disk drive I have ever seen.