Kingston HyperX 3K 120 GB SATA III 2.5-Inch 6.0 Gb/s Solid State Drive SH103S3/120G

Kingston HyperX 3K 120 GB SATA III 2.5-Inch 6.0 Gb/s Solid State Drive SH103S3/120G..

Buy Kingston HyperX 3K 120 GB SATA III 2.5-Inch 6.0 Gb/s Solid State Drive SH103S3/120G By Kingston

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108 of 113 people found the following review helpful.
Tool Box could be better. Update 11/05/2013: Still reliable after 1 year.
By MoJo In New Orleans
Thank you Amazon for the very quick delivery.

I have been noticing that a lot of SSD vendors ship out their products in nothing more than a hard plastic shell, not Kingston. The Hyper 3k comes packaged with a nice box. The SSD and the 3.5" adapter and screws are held snugly in place by dense foam. As this is a bare drive, there are no software or sata cable provided. However, sata cables are cheap and software to clone your old drive to your new SSD can be downloaded for free from various software companies.

I'm sure you all are aware that SSDs are fast, really fast when compared to HDD. This Hyper 3k is no exception. To maximize the speed of this SSD make sure you run it in AHCI mode and not IDE mode. It is very comparable to my girlfriend's Samsung 830 speedwise. It is also built, in my opinion, a little sturdier than the Samsung. It seems a little heavier and the header where you plug in the power and sata is much, much better than the Samsung. With the Samsung when you try to disconnect the sata cable it almost feel as if the whole header will come off. The Samsung, however, has a much better toolbox called Samsung SSD Magician. The Samsung SSD Magician has features to optimize the OS, to do firmware update, to run benchmark, performance optimization, and secure erase. The Kingston SSD Toolbox, which must downloaded from Kingston website, only gives you Drive and Details. Details is useless, and Drive will tell you the model of your SSD and the firmware that came with your SSD. Kingston, you guys really need to give us a better toolbox. Visually, the toolbox looks like it was designed back in the 90's.

Firmware can not be updated via the Toolbox, you have to go to Kingston website and download it from there. Quite cumbersome. Also in order to update the firmware, you HAVE to be in AHCI mode. If you are in IDE mode, don't panic, there are quite a few tutorials on the web on how to change from IDE to AHCI by in the registry and reboot into bios to enable AHCI.

Good news for Windows 7 users, your SSD will be automatically be 4K aligned. What does that mean? It means you can clone or migrate your OS to the new SSD and not having to worried about doing the 4K alignment yourself.

For cloning my HDD to my Hyper 3k I used to programs, AOMEI partition Assistant 5.1 and Macrium Reflect 5. Both are free programs.
1. Install your SSD in the computer case but don't plug it in to the motherboard yet.

2. Uninstall any programs that you no longer used in your HDD, are haven't used in a long while, which means you are no longer using it:)

3. Defrag your HDD. What you are doing is trying to remove as much data as possible because the content that is left has to fit into
your new SSD.

4. Once it is smaller, launch AOMEI and shrink your drive. For example, you wean down the content of your 1TB drive to 150GB of data. Macrium Reflect will not be able to clone your drive because it still sees 1TB and will give you an error message that your source drive is bigger than you destination drive. With AOMEI you can shrink the PARTITION of you drive to 150GB. There is a tutorial on AOMEI's website. *you will have to reboot after AOMEI shrinks your partition*

5. After the reboot, power down your computer.

6. Plug your SSD to the motherboard with the sata cable and connect the sata power cable from your power supply to the SSD.

7. Turn on your computer and go disk management and initialize the unknown drive (your SSD). Once initialized, Windows will recognize your SSD and assigned a drive letter to it.

8. Launch Macrium reflect and click on clone my drive. It will show your HDD and SSD. All you have to do is drag the partitions down to the SSD. Most people will only have 2 partitions on the HDD.

9. Sit back, relax, this could take 30 minutes or more depending on how much data you have. I only had to clone 73GB so it took only 17 minutes.

10. After it's done, you will need to reboot.

11. Google how to enable AHCI mode and follow the steps (not long and complicated at all).

12. One more reboot and you are done.

Enjoy your new drive:)

Update 11/05/13: After 1 year of usage, this SSD is still as fast as the 1st day I installed it. It has proven to be very reliable. The Kingston HyperX 3K withstood 2 abrupt power failure and a lot, and I mean a lot, of writing cycles as I am constantly moving my steam games back and forth from SSD to my HDD. Toolbox still shows that my SSD's health is still 100%.

The Holiday season is here and if you are looking purchase a SSD for yourself or as a gift for someone else, I recommend that you consider this SSD (if the price is right).

44 of 46 people found the following review helpful.
Update your firmware!! (EDIT - this is no longer necessary, but firmware support has ended. See comments)
By Josh Hinnenkamp
My drive which shipped on October 15th, 2012 came with revision 501 (501ABBF0) firmware on it, which has been out-of-date since June. At this time, the latest revision is 503 (503ABBF0) which was released in August.

I had some difficulty updating the firmware to Rev 503. The Kingston firmware update utility (found at Kingston.com > Support > Drivers/Downloads > Solid-State Drives > HyperX SSD -- SH103S3 > Firmware Update) would not recognize the drive.

As it turns out, it was either a conflict with the Intel Rapid Storage Technology (RST) software I had installed, or the Intel AHCI driver that installs with the Intel RST software. Once I uninstalled Intel RST, rebooted, and the generic AHCI driver was automatically installed in its place by Windows 7, the Kingston firmware update utility recognized the drive and successfully updated to revision 503.

Once the update was completed, the Kingston firmware update utility will recognize the drive with or without the Intel RST software and Intel AHCI driver installed. There must be an incompatibility with revision 501.

The Kingston firmware update utility will tell you your firmware revision number. Make sure to check it out first thing after you get your drive!

43 of 49 people found the following review helpful.
Good fast drive nice vs sale price w/ bracket but.....
By Stephen
Drive is a good cost performance pay off but...
sata and power connectors seems to be made of brittle plastic without any reinforcement of a surrounding housing. This makes it easy to tweak the connection a bit when installing in tighter cases for instance. After 3 unplugs entire plastic connector broke off inside power connector.

Lucky exposed copper prongs still still allowed me use what was left of the messed up connector, so I continue to use the drive.

If I was a complete noob I would probably just being flaming this drive. Admittedly I could have been a bit more careful had I known how delicate these connectors were. Never had this kind of issue with the untold amount drives I have swapped in my lifetime. I bought it on sale, so GREAT DEAL!, just be careful with those connectors. Maybe even apply some dielectric grease.

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Seagate Barracuda 500 GB HDD SATA 6 Gb/s NCQ 16MB Cache 3.5-Inch Internal Bare Drive ST500DM002

Seagate Barracuda 500 GB HDD SATA 6 Gb/s NCQ 16MB Cache 3.5-Inch Internal Bare Drive ST500DM002..

GET Seagate Barracuda 500 GB HDD SATA 6 Gb/s NCQ 16MB Cache 3.5-Inch Internal Bare Drive ST500DM002 By Seagate

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1970 of 2186 people found the following review helpful.
POWER OF ONE or WEAKNESS OF 0.67 - how to avoid getting the bad drive version...
By niels
UPDATE January 2014:

Thanks to information from many useful comments, a short update:

1) The problem is still the same as it was. Both 2TB drives are still being sold with the same model number. Due to changes in serial nunbers, depth of the drive housing's indentation has now become the best way to distinquish the drives (see user images - bottom right of Amazon's product page)

2) When I wrote this, I didn't feel up to offering an alternate drive recommendation, as my own opinion is based on personal experience and hence anecdotal. Many people asked, but I only answered in email, without adding a recommendation to the review.

Since Backblaze's (an online data backup company) massive long term test, their blog and extremetech's article based on that (see comments, page 26 for a link), I'll just quote their blog: "If the price were right, we would be buying nothing but Hitachi drives. They have been rock solid, and have had a remarkably low failure rate."

So, is that data even relevant for the average home user? I would say yes, because continuous, heavy use of large numbers of drives is the only way to get any half-reliable comparison. Among consumers, usage patterns are simply spread too wide: if someone only turns on their computer 15 times a year (my aunt), any drive will be the same as any other drive, cause with so little use, they will all last till the lubricant in the spindle dries up, and she'll tell anyone who asks that her drive is great. This inability to compare reliability in the consumer space has bolstered sales of shoddy drives for a long time.

If you do use your computer frequently, installing drives exhibiting a <1% annual failure rate at Backblaze certainly beats installing drives with a 15% or even 120% annual failure rate.

**end update**

ok, so this drive is listed as the "Seagate ST2000DM001" and guess what; other than that it sports 2 Terabytes, it tells you nothing whatever about what drive you'll end up with, because Seagate has chosen to obscure and omit relevant Data between different builds with vastly different performance.

The short advice: Only purchase versions xxExxxxx [and possibly x24xxxxx - x24 is unverified info so far, see notes below] of the 2TB model. This uses 2 platters and 4 heads.
It performs 30% better than the version with 3 platters, which has an xxFxxxxx [or possibly x36xxxxx] designation. Avoid those!

You'll need to contact the seller and ask them to check the code on the drive. If they can't verify, don't buy it, better to get a drive from a different company, where its hopefully not a surprise game of what's in the box.

S - SU - Suzhou China
W - WU - Wuxi China
Z - TK - Korat Thailand

F = 3 platters with either 5 or 6 heads (bad 2TB drive or good 3TB drive)
E = 2 platters with 4 heads. (good 2TB drive)
D = 1 platter with 2 heads. (good 1TB drive)

Weight info received in a comment here, suggests that the 'good' 2-platter drive weighs 534 grams, while the 'bad' 3-platter drive weighs 624 grams.

Seagate used to embed the information about their drives in the model number, but now they obscured it, so they can pawn off whatever they want. Send a WxE model to Publications who test drives, and then ship the crappy WxF model to unsuspecting customers who may never realize they're not getting what they thought they were buying. This should really be illegal.

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NOTE 1: This was written for the 2TB drive. It turns out Amazon also shows this review for 3TB drives. This info does not apply to 3TB drives, the 3TB drives always have 3 1TB platters. (or not, there have been reports of 5 platter 3TB versions, if you know anything more, let us know)

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NOTE 2: comparison test results - since links get killed in reviews, I'll upload an image to the product page.

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NOTE 3: A relevant post on Seagate's forum stating that these Barracuda have been crippled through redesign [see the link in comment 143 below, page 15]
(Apparently, links are permitted in comments)

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NOTE 4: Someone commented that Seagate removed any reference to the 2 platter version of this drive in the manual (something which is usually only read after the purchase)

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NOTE 5: Someone explained that Seagate made this change due to the flooding of their plant in Thailand. This is not quite correct since chinese 2 platter 2TB drives are also in circulation.

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NOTE 6: While the channel still has drives with the numbering scheme as described above, there appear to be at least some drives with a new numbering scheme like "Z240PJB3". Would be great if it read out like x24xxxxx, where 2 stands for 2 platters and 4 stands for 4 heads, then this would be one of the good drives while something like x35xxxxx would be the bad drives. (this is just a guess so far, its not verified)

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NOTE 7: Someone added that 2 platter drives (based on other pictures) are 'thinner' with deeper indents on the bottom and top and have a dot matrix code on the bottom right third of the top next to the label. (note that labels are not safe indicators, as they could change an older factory to add barcodes or switch to their latest labeling system any time they wish)

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NOTE 8: Seagate has reacted and added more drive info on this product page, advertising "POWER OF ONE" meaning 1 platter per terabyte. This is good news, but that doesn't mean you can relax and just hit the 'buy' button:
a) channel inventory of drives manufactured prior to this "Power of One" initiative will be around for some time to come, so you still need to verify.
b) the specifications sheet Seagate still links on this very page (as of June 28, 2013) shows 6 heads, 3 disks for the 2TB version. With conflicting information, its still a little hard to tell for consumers if they're getting "POWER OF ONE" or "WEAKNESS OF 0.67"

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Once Seagate "fixes" their spec sheet info for the 2TB drive which directly conflicts with the "Power of One" advertising, I'd be happy to change my conclusion below. After all, it would mean they decided to be honest and transparent again, rather than hell bent on destroying the reputation of their 'Barracuda' brand.

But right now, what is the point of advertising "Power of One" while saying their 2TB drives have 3 platters with 0.67 TB at the same time.

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CONCLUSION:
Seagate's real reason to obscure drive information is being able to use lower bin or older tech platters that can only hold ~670 GB, so they use 3 platters. This is a fine business decision, but an honest company would give it a new Model number/name, as its a different product with lower speeds, lower reliability and higher weight.

But why be honest, if you can cheat and make a few dollars extra per drive, by selling it under the same name as the better drive, which has been reviewed extensively and lauded for its higher speeds?

Last Update: June 28, 2013 (in response to Seagate's new additions to this page and with thanks to Alex and J. Goodman)

460 of 514 people found the following review helpful.
3TB for Synology NAS
By Steve Eagle
This is one of the select few 3TB drives approved by Synology for use in a variety of their NAS devices, so I put 4 of these in a DS411 in SHR with one disk redundancy (basically RAID 5). While anyone will tell you enterprise hard drives are better in RAID 5 or 6 configurations - and they are right, for the most part - it's hard to deny the big price difference in going enterprise: 3TB enterprise drives are well over $550 right now due to the recent Thailand flood and it may be some time before that price drops significantly. While these drives weren't as cheap as the 3TB WD Caviar Green varieties, I will NEVER put Caviar Greens in a RAID 5 again, so the ST3000DM001 quickly rose to the top of my admittedly short list.

I think it's important to point out that IntelliPower (WD) and CoolSpin (Hitachi) technologies are not really ideal for any kind of RAID array using parity. WD Caviar Green drives, especially, are known to sometimes not power up when needed, ultimately resulting in them getting dropped from the RAID array. A good NAS like the DS411 will put the drives into hibernation after 10 minutes of no activity, so you don't really need the benefit of "eco-friendly" drives in this kind of RAID anyways. Plus, with 7200RPM you will get speed improvements, so it's a no brainer to pick a drive like this over those.

That said, of course these do not have TLER, RAFF and other advantages of enterprise-class drives. So you run the risk of more errors, RAID rebuilds and potential failures by choosing a consumer drive like this. But even though the risk is greater, it's not really worth the extra money to go to 3TB enterprise-class, so I feel this is a good compromise of risk vs. value.

UPDATE - 7/12/13

I felt I should come back and update this review (and my rating) due to 2 of these drives encountering bad sectors and getting dropped from my RAID volume within a 1 month period of time. It took over a year and a half for this to happen but it's still an unacceptable loss ratio in my opinion. I still did not encounter that dreaded second disk failure while rebuilding my RAID5 with a new drive - both times the rebuilds completed without a hitch. Once again, that situation has not happened in my 15 years of professional IT work. I ended up going with the WD Red 3 TB NAS Hard Drive: 3.5 Inch, SATA III, 64 MB Cache - WD30EFRX to replace the Seagates. Although Synology and other NAS manufacturers ignore the TLER timings in enterprise drives and implement their own, I feel the Reds (and by extension the RE's) are better suited for NAS usage and will be more versatile should I choose to put them in different RAIDs or NAS's in the future.

So in summary, I can't really recommend these Seagates anymore after my personal experience and the drop in price in the WD Reds.

290 of 335 people found the following review helpful.
So far, so good.
By Skullywag
I've dealt almost exclusively with WD for the last 10 years....I had a string of bad luck with Seagate before that, and had sworn off of them. Well, times have changed, and I'm willing to see if Seagate has improved over the years. Post-flood WD seems to be sticking to the absurd prices after other makers are slowly going back down to reasonable prices. And I have to say price played a BIG part in these recent purchases...I REFUSE to pay more for a WD GREEN drive than I did for a Black drive twice the size a year ago...I just refuse.
In a non-raid environment, this 2TB drive seems to be snappy, worked out of the box, and has had no errors...so far so good. Just ordered 2 of the 3TB variety on the strength of this one.

I've been seeing A LOT of neg reviews lately for ALL manufactures in ALL price ranges, it's my belief that the many DOAs have more to do with how the drives are handled in transit, than quality control. I've SEEN the way carriers toss the packages around to get to others, and have even seen them STAND on packages....no bubble wrap is going to compensate for that kind of abuse. Still other complaints I've seen have more to do with ignorance than anything...who in their right mind expects to drop a 2TB-3TB drive in a 10 year old machine and expect it to work out of the box, without using the manufactureres tool? Or expects lightning speeds when a SATA 6GB drive is plugged into a SATA 1.5GB port? And if I read one more review where a clueless person can't understand why a 3 TB reports as less than 3TB in Windows...I'll scream!

I think it stinks that warrantys have been cut, and there is still the question in my mind if post-flood drives are being rushed out to meet demand before factorys are up-to-snuff, or if all that fresh new equipment means a better product....guess we'll see.
From a one week perspective, I have no complaints with this drive. In the weeks to come, if I DO....I'll let ya know.

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