Seagate 600 480 GB vs. Kingston HyperX 3K 480 GB SSD Review

Introduction

Solid state drives have come down significantly in price over the last few years, so it’s now cheaper than ever to upgrade your PC. While 120/128 GiB units offer the best compromise between price and capacity in most cases, some users may opt for a 480 GiB model instead if extra storage space is required. Today, we are going to look at two of the latest 480 GiB models; the Seagate 600 and the Kingston HyperX 3K.

There are many components in a PC that can be upgraded to make it faster, but none are as noticeable in the real world as upgrading a hard drive to a solid state drive. A 480 GiB solid state drive is ideal for those who are confined to a single drive in a laptop or those who need a lot of storage space for large applications and games.

Even though both units have 512 GiB of memory inside, they are sold as 480 GiB, since 32 GiB is reserved for overprovisioning, used by the garbage collection and wear leveling mechanisms of the unit.

Figure 1: The two SSDs on test

Before proceeding, we highly suggest that you read our “Anatomy of SSD Units” tutorial, which provides all the background information you need to know about SSDs. Both of the SSDs featured in this review use MLC memory chips.

In the table below we compare the Seagate 600 480 GiB with the Kingston HyperX 3K 480 GiB. Both units use a SATA-600 interface and are based on the 2.5” form factor, but the Seagate unit is 7 mm thick (thus fitting some thin notebooks or ultrabooks that require storage devices with this height) while the Kingston drive is 9.5 mm thick.

* This price refers to the stand-alone drive for comparison. The drive we actually tested came with the bundle kit, which costs USD 500.00.

We researched the prices on the day that we published this review. In the table below, we provide a more in-depth technical comparison between the two drives. Most chip manufacturers don’t detail the specifics of their chips on their websites, so we are only linking to what we found.