As the devices we carry around with us get smaller and smaller there is going to be an increasing want (or need) for larger and faster portable storage devices. We have watched over the last few years as the storage capacity of USB flash drives (Pen Drives, Thumb Drives etc.) has grown rapidly. It was not that long ago that a 1-2GB drive was something to have. Now we have small flash drives in the 64, 128 and even 256GB range! Kingston has been one of the companies on the forefront if this charge into larger capacity and faster performance. We have tested out multiple products from them from encrypted storage devices to the hefty DTUltimate G2 32GB USB3.0 thumb drive. Now we have a new product on the bench from Kingston. This one is being sold under their performance name HyperX. The Drive boasts 64GB of storage and 225MB/s of read performance! If the paper is to be believed this is almost twice the performance of the DTUltimate G2, which topped out at around 116MB in our testing. Let’s dive in and see if the paper claims match the real world performance.
Performance - Testing the performance of a drive of any type is a pain. Sure you can get repeatable numbers using a few of the more readily available testing utilities; HD Tach, Sisoft’s SANDRA, AIDA64, and others. For our testing we decided to run Sisoft’s SANDRA disk bench and the removable storage test to get our base numbers. Then we ran AIDA64’s disk benchmark to add in some extra information. We have already introduced the three of the competitors in the test so let’s introduce the last one the Seagate Black Armor PS-110 and then dive right in. The performance numbers are VERY impressive. It is not often that we find the real world (ok synthetic) test data exceeding what is printed on the packaging. However, her we do see this. Kingston’s label lists a read speed of 225MB/s we consistently saw 245-252MB/s with an average of 249.62MB/s which is more than double the performance of the G2. AIDA64 shows us pretty much the same thing but breaks it down into much smaller packet sets so you can see the performance at each data block size. Notice the max block size for each is different. The DT Locker + uses 128KB because it is also passing decryption data while it is running. The others are all based on the formats and sizes (capacity). Since most external drives are Fat-32 you will see a 32 KB block size used for testing, the NTFS (New Technology File System) will have 64 KB block size.Like the G2 the HyperX 3.0 is very quick even when moving larger files; in fact it felt much faster than the G2. The down side is the formatting. It is formatted as a Fat-32 volume this means that you cannot put anything larger than a 2GB file on it. Not that big of a deal for most, however if you are looking to store image files (I keep OS and other software as Image files) you have to make sure they are less than 2GB in size. The other way to get around this (and by the way gain some performance) is to convert the whole volume to NTFS. If you are running Windows and have no intention to use this between operating system platforms then you would only gain from the re-format. After all the only reason these drives are formatted Fat-32 is for cross platform compatibility.
