It’s faster than your average thumb drive.
Flash memory performance can be something of a minefield for the unwary. There’s a huge gulf between the performance of the higher-end devices and the cheapies you pick up for $15 from the OfficeWorks bargain bin. As much as capacity, it’s performance that really separates the good flash drives from the bad, and it’s why you often see two drives of the same capacity for vastly different prices.
The HyperX is a drive that offers both capacity and performance. You can store a lot of movies, pictures or music on 64GB, and the eight-channel microcontroller can deliver peak speeds that are as much as twice or even four times higher than the more common four-channel and two-channel controllers.
According to Kingston, it can achieve speeds of 225MB/s read and 135MB/s write. In the real-world tests, of course, our results were much lower, but they were still close to hard drive speeds, which is a good result for a USB flash drive. It even handled small file reads and writes well, which are often the Achilles’ heel of flash drives.
The HyperX is available is sizes up to 256GB (though we could only get a 64GB model for review) and all capacities come in a compact thumb format with a pleasingly textured casing and separate cap. There are no frills with the drives -- they don’t come with any software or any kind of encryption, just plenty of capacity, speedy performance and a full five-year warranty.
Available from Kingston, retailing for $149.
APC rating: 9/10 (Editor's Choice)
