Kingston HyperX Fury 240GB Solid State Drive Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

Kingston’s Fury product line as part of the HyperX family in my eyes allows the enthusiast range to spread itself out to a far greater audience where budgets are a lot more important over pure performance – think of it like getting a cheaper sports car; it is in the right family, giving the same essence, the trade-off is simply a little less performance. Further more, Kingston’s pitch for the Fury SSD is price. In the UK we find the 240GB Fury just making it into the sub-£100 group of drives with both Amazon and Overclockers holding stock for £97.79 and £99.98 respectively; with in the US we find the Fury holding a similarly low price tag of $114.99 on Amazon and Newegg.

Overview

As we’ve seen from one of Ryan’s recent reviews, Kingston’s Fury line of products in the HyperX family are not just limited to SSDs. The Fury memory kits bring a wide variety of colour to the market, making them ideal kits for matching colour themed builds. On the SSD side though we have to be honest that [even on a desktop platform] style and colour is not a factor to be considered when buying a drive. All SSDs have to follow a basic dimensional blueprint so this means we have to look inside at what sets these drives apart.

On the note of pricing, this is where Kingston have wanted to push the drive to market. The 3K is their performance drive in the HyperX family and the new Fury is their budget option. Sadly though Kingston have already been beaten to it with drives such as the MX100 from Crucial sending a pricing shockwave through the market with both their 256GB and 512GB drives costing only 31p per GB of raw storage. The use of a SandForce controller is one of the expected ways in which vendors can offer a cheaper solution however other vendors are now finding ways in which they can offer controllers with better performance, but for a lower cost. Simply put this means [in my eyes] that the days for the trusty SF-2281 controller are somewhat numbered.

What does this all mean for the fury though? Well to me this particular combination of components feels a little yester-year and consequently I fell like Kingston is late to the party with a drive that quite simply is going to be wiped out by the competition simply on performance along. Granted they have not built this drive performance, pitching this drive as a wallet friendly option that will get you on to the SSD ladder, but when you line this drive up against a few non SandForce based drives that are priced around the same [or less], I don’t think many people are going to pick this as their product of choice.

I would have loved to say that Kingston’s Fury product line is fantastic right throughout the catalogue, but sadly the Fury SSD feel too dated and Kingston need to take it right back to the drawing board and look at current market trends to come back with something that is a more worthy contender for the ultimate budget drive.

Pros:

• Sub £100 / $120 price point
• 7mm z-height form factor
• Part of the well known HyperX family
• 3 year warranty

Cons:

• SandForce controller severely limits this drives ability
• No match for its competitors

“Coming up with a cheaper option for a rapidly growing budget market for enthusiast grade components is something that every vendor is doing at the moment. Sadly though Kingston’s HyperX Fury SSD may have the right idea, however there are cheaper and much faster options out there that wipe this drive right out of the ring.”

Thanks to Zaboura PR for providing this review sample.