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.
Value -Value is another very subjective topic. What is expensive to some might be a deal to others. You can look at this topic in multiple ways. One is raw price and the other is what you get for the money. Each is accurate and both are correct ways to look at price/value. We tend to look at features, performance and real-property when we discuss value. However, we also take into account the raw cash cost of the item. If you can find the DataTraveler HyperX 3.0 you can expect to pay around $150 for the 64GB model (like the one reviewed here) and $250 for the 128GB version. These prices seem pretty high when looked first looked at. However, when we take a step back and see that we have a USB flash drive that is capable of speeds that match existing SATA II SSDs speeds then it is not that outrageous. Conclusion -The Kingston DataTraveler HyperX 3.0 is a great thumb drive. It does have some drawbacks though. The first is the formatting. While I know that Fat-32 is intended for compatibility across multiple platforms, it causes issues with the size of the files that can be stored on the drive. It also does hinder performance a little bit. The good news is that you can reformat the DT HyperX 3.0 to NTFS, or any number of file systems depending on your choice of operating system. Even with this issue (and one that is not limited to Kingston’s drives) we still can highly recommend the DT HyperX3.0 to anyone looking to some extra portable storage. Put simply, the HyperX 3.0 is ridiculously fast and has quite a bit of extra space for whatever you want to put on it.Discuss this in our Forum
