Maybe one day even your toaster and microwave will sport RGB lighting. In the meantime, you will have to settle for RGB lights on only keyboards, mice, headsets, RAM, CPU coolers, power supplies, PSU cabling, graphics cards, motherboards, and yes, now solid state drives as well.
That latter bit is thanks in part to HyperX and its new Fury RGB SSD family. HyperX is not actually the first to slap RGB lighting on SSDs—Team Group beat it to the punch with its Delta RGB SSDs, and perhaps there are others I'm not aware of— but for the most part, SSDs have largely avoided the trend.
The Fury RGB SSD series is a line of 2.5-inch SATA 6Gbps drives, rather than the nimbler M.2 NVMe route the company could have taken. SATA drives generally offer a better bang for your buck and are far faster than mechanical hard disk drives.
In this case, the Fury RGB SSD series is rated to deliver up to 550MB/s of sequential read performance and up to 480MB/s of sequential writes. The rated read speed is roughly on par with higher performing SATA drives, while the rated write speed is slightly lower than some of the faster models. To be clear though, we haven't tested these drives, so we don't know how they actually perform, versus what HyperX claims.
HyperX is obviously pushing the lighting angle with this series. It's an interesting implementation, as the drives can be daisy chained to other devices in your rig to synchronize lighting.
The new drives are being offered in 240GB, 480GB, and 960GB capacities, both as standalone drives and as part of an upgrade bundle kit (comes with a 3.5-inch bracket and mounting screws, SATA cable, USB 3.1 Type-A to mini-USB cable, and HDD cloning software).
Pricing from HyperX's web store breaks down as follows:
- HyperX Fury RGB SSD 240GB (standalone): $128
- HyperX Fury RGB SSD 240GB (upgrade kit): $155
- HyperX Fury RGB SSD 480GB (standalone): $210
- HyperX Fury RGB SSD 480GB (upgrade kit): $237
- HyperX Fury RGB SSD 960GB (standalone): $373
- HyperX Fury RGB SSD 9600GB (upgrade kit): $400
Those prices are high for what you're getting. For comparison, you can snag a 1TB Crucial MX500 SSD from Amazon for $159.99, and we've seen it drop as low as $150.99 on sale recently. You lose out on RGB lighting, and the daisy chaining capability is rather neat. But paying more than double versus comparable, non-RGB drives is a tough ask.
Fortunately, street pricing is considerably lower. Here's what they're going for on Amazon:
- HyperX Fury RGB SSD 240GB (standalone): $74.99
- HyperX Fury RGB SSD 240GB (upgrade kit): $89.99
- HyperX Fury RGB SSD 480GB (standalone): $124.99
- HyperX Fury RGB SSD 480GB (upgrade kit): $139.99
- HyperX Fury RGB SSD 960GB (standalone): $219.99
- HyperX Fury RGB SSD 960GB (upgrade kit): $234.99
Those are much more palatable price points, though obviously still representative of a premium for the RGB lights. For anyone who is interested, the entire lineup is available now.
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