Kingston HyperX Predator M.2 SSD On Ubuntu: Linux Might Have Problems With It

While recently I've posted a number of Linux solid-state drive benchmarks from low-end SATA 3.0 SSDs being used in Linux test systems not frequently being stressed by disk/file-system workloads, here are some benchmark results using a higher-end M.2 SSD. Benchmark results today are from the Kingston HyperX Predator 240GB M.2 Gen2 x4.

The Kingston HyperX Predator 240GB M.2 SSD (SHPM2280P2/240G) is a $220 USD drive that claims read speeds up to 1400MB/s and writes up to 600MB/s. With the PCI-E M.2 interface it's obviously designed to be higher-performant than Serial ATA drives. I decided to buy this drive to move to a faster-performing solution in one of my Intel Xeon systems that is routinely used for Linux file-system testing/benchmarking. In this article are some early benchmarks I've carried out so far for this Kingston HyperX Predator SSD.

The Kingston HyperX Predator PCI Express SSDs launched earlier this year in 240GB and 480GB capacities. There's also HHHL versions that occupy a PCI-E x4 slot rather than an M.2 slot, for users with older motherboards. The Predator PCI-E SSD uses a Marvell 88SS9293 controller and is using Toshiba TH58TE68DDKBA8C memory chips.

With this being just a unit I purchased from Amazon and not being the focal point of a full-blown review, for this testing I compared the performance of this M.2 SSD to some other lower-end SATA 3.0 SSDs I've tested recently. All benchmarks were done from an Ubuntu 15.04 x86_64 system using a Linux 4.2 development kernel and the drives being formatted to EXT4. All of the disk benchmarks were facilitated in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite software.