So, I just got off the phone with the folks at Kingston who had some very interesting news to share about their first HyperX SSD.

They recently took delivery of the latest SandForce firmware and after some tinkering around on their drive they managed to boost performance even further over the originally claimed numbers. The drives are already packed up and ready to ship this week and they will come with the old firmware that provides the SSD with a 525MB/s read and 480MB/s write.

The new firmware which will be on the Kingston website soon for download improves things even more and gives the HyperX SSD a read speed of 555MB/s and a write speed of 510MB/s. This makes it a smidgen faster than the best 2.5-inch SATA III drive from OCZ and others who have drives that operate at 550MB/s.

Our storage guru Chris has a drive on the way and of course he will update to the latest firmware for his testing. Once he does, he could well be testing the fastest 2.5-inch SATA III SDD on the planet.

UPDATE - Okay, so there was some confusion yesterday. It turns out all drives will operate at the new speeds of 555 / 510, it just might be the case that some retail boxes may have the older speeds printed.