For years we have maintained that the single most important upgrade you can make to an enthusiast-grade machine is adding an SSD for your operating system and applications. The key downside to SSD technology is its cost per gigabyte, which is significantly higher than traditional mechanical hard drives.

Hoping to nab a slice of the hybrid market, OCZ has launched its RevoDrive Hybrid, which fuses a 100GB SSD to a PCB alongside a 1TB 2.5" hard drive and connects using the PCI Express 2.0 x4 bus. At $500, this solution is priced at a peculiar $0.50/GB. It isn't exactly entry-level but that's significantly less than any SSD.

Although a seemingly diverse array of SATA 6Gb/s SSDs have launched in recent months, virtually all of them are powered by the Marvell 88SS9174 or SandForce SF-2200 controllers. A third competitor has been quietly lurking in the shadows: Samsung.

The Samsung 830 Series embraces the SATA 6Gb/s interface, touting 520MB/s reads and 400MB/s writes. Carrying a house-crafted controller and memory this latest entry to market doesn’t look as it will disappoint.

First demonstrated by OCZ's Vertex 3, the new SandForce SF-2200 controller offers incredible read and write performance of over 500MB/s. By sitting on the sidelines until now, Kingston has been afforded the luxury of refining its firmware and avoiding the issues others have been experiencing.

With that in mind, it's only fair to believe Kingston's latest addition will be a rock solid representation of the SandForce SF-2200 controller. Let's press on here and see if the HyperX can live up to that expectation.