Kingston HyperX 3K 240 GB SATA III 2.5-Inch 6.0 Gb/s Solid State Drive

After a botched shipping mishap for the new Intel 335 SSD I decided to go with this drive. I installed this on an ASROCK X58 motherboard system doing a fresh install of Windows 7 64. After doing a little preparation to get Windows 7 install on a USB drive I was up and running with a fresh install of Windows with necessary drivers in less than 20 minutes.I am absolutely blown away by the performance even on a SATA II based system. The throughputs are maxed out around 290mb/s like other reviewers of SATA II systems, but even at this throughput I am amazed at what a huge difference in performance it makes over ANY regular HDD drive even the 10k Raptor drives in raid configurations.I can boot completely to desktop, even with password entry, in 20 seconds. Any Office app, Web page, or game starts in a mere second or two. As a gamer my favorite part is normally the level loads, transition cut scenes, etc. come up in a fraction of the time now.So you can try to compare SSD to SDD and whether one gets 460mb/s vs 490mb/s, but you will never likely ever see the difference. Just get a SSD that has proven reliability, a decent controller, and enough capacity and you'll be set. I originally wanted an Intel for reliability, but Kingston was a very close runner up and I have loved every second owning this thing.As anecdotal evidence of how well this works, my wife thought I bought an entire new computer when I installed this. Even after loading up the drive with a dozen games and other programs, and using it for awhile, she still thinks I installed a completely new computer. My wife also commented on how she thought the hard drive was "broken" when she didn't hear the normal "grinding" associated with HDD, especially on shutdown. She is just tickled that everything just springs to life instantly.If you're on the fence, even at this price point and you only have a SATA II interface, don't hesitate! Just go ahead and click the add to cart button now!

This little SSD is so useful that I bought another one. Benefits:- 10x faster (by human reckoning) than my regular hard drive- extends my laptop battery life by about 50% (again by human reckoning)- big enough to hold my OS, Office applications, and a week's worth of heavy photo shooting (about 2,000 RAW images)I've had two of these little drives - one for my laptop, one for my desktop for over a year. They do exactly what I want, and they worked without a glitch.- is size an issue? Not for me, and I have heavy long-term storage needs.In a typical week I'll shoot a few thousand images. I need the speed an SSD provides in order to boost my productivity. I really can't afford to sit around and wait for my computer to boot up or for my 20 MB RAW photos to load into my editing software. Kingston's 240 GB drive holds all the images I need to complete a project with maximum productivity. Once I complete a project, I move it onto a regular hard drive for long-term storage where I seldom access it (I have about 20 TB of storage requirements, so even a regular hard drive is going to fall short).Bottom line: 240 GB gives me plenty of elbow room to work on and finish large projects with maximum productivity.

If you are having any second thoughts on this product, stop right there.This product has boosted the speed of my Lenovo Y500 laptop IMMENSELY!It is fast, and I get a less than 7 second boot time (Time varies by system of course).Amazon shipped my item in a big envelope, and I feel like it should have been shipped in a box, but the product was delivered fine.Pros:+ Product is fast+ Product is solid, and sturdy.+ Product was easy to install (Even came with extra screws and a 3.5 inch mounting bracket)+ Comes with 3 year manufacture warranty.Cons:- Had some issues transferring OS, so I just reinstalled. (Problems vary on computer, the hard drive did not make this a hard process, but if you are considering transferring an OS to any hard drive it can be complicated)Let me just say this. This was an expensive buy for me, and I was having second thoughts. Trust me. It was worth every cent, and I would not hesitate to buy another. If I were to ever build a custom PC, this would be my SSD of choice.

Personally I've owned several of these and have never had a single one go bad. They're all in use within several PCs. They aren't the fastest, although you'd never be able to tell- contrary to all the marketing hype out there with other SSDs, and they don't include corporate fluff abilities that most of us don't care about. These drives are, however, very solid with the best thermal shielding I've ever seen and are as reliable as you could ever ask for. SandForce is a mature SSD controller which has come along way. It's one of the fastest due to its ability to compress most data before the processors within the SSD begin writing it to memory. This allows them to handle the work loads quicker so you can realize full SATA III potential. SSDBoss benchmarks will show that in real world use these drives hit a solid 9.5/10 and are only beat by Samsung's EXO and Pro SSDs, both of which have less mature controllers that are a nightmare to update the firmware for without their Windows only software. For the money and real world performance you cannot beat these drives right now. Combine that with their excellent build quality and reliability and you have a real winner. Enjoy!