Manufacturer: Kingston Price: $ 125 US Author: Steve Date: 04/10/2012

[ Introduction ]

Today we are looking at the Kingston DataTraveler HyperX 3.0 64GB, which is the company’s fastest USB flash drive to date. By utilizing an eight-channel architecture Kingston claims that this new drive can achieved transfer rates of up to 225MB/s read and 135MB/s write, while capacities will range from 64GB through to 256GB... These days they are everywhere, but the flash drive as we know it has only been around for a little over a decade, having been first introduced in late 2000. Trek Technology developed the first flash disk and IBM marketed it under the "DiskOnKey" brand, featuring a whopping 8MB of storage. This was impressive at the time considering the form factor and because floppy disks were still widely used to move small amounts of data. Coincidentally, the first implementation of USB 2.0 was also introduced in 2000. Although the interface has kept evolving and became mainstream in this last decade, it's starting to show its age where performance is concerned. The interface's maximum throughput of 60MB/s is no longer cutting it, especially when you consider the fact that its communication is half-duplex, meaning that data can flow both ways, but not at the same time. Even the fastest USB 2.0 flash drives are unable to match today's conventional hard drives. Considering that we often cite hard drives as the slowest component in a computer, it's about time we moved on. The storage industry has been preparing the shift to USB 3.0 connectivity for quite some time. Dubbed SuperSpeed USB, USB 3.0 offers bi-directional (full-duplex) communication and a tenfold boost in transfer speeds as well as improved capabilities, all while maintaining compatibility with USB 2.0 devices. (Read our USB 3.0: What You Need To Know Guide for a full rundown of the new interface). In terms of tangible improvements, USB 3.0 flash devices are still yet to reach their full potential, but as the standard matures the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) considers it reasonable to achieve a throughput of 400MB/s, or just about enough to transfer a 27GB high definition movie in a little over a minute rather than 15 or more with USB 2.0. So although the claimed 225MB/s read performance of the DataTraveler HyperX 3.0 is roughly just half that of the USB 3.0 interfaces maximum bandwidth, it is still significantly faster than the USB 2.0 devices that it is replacing. Before we jump into the benchmarking section of our review let’s just take a closer look at the DataTraveler HyperX 3.0...

Table of Contents >>> Introduction <<< DataTraveler HyperX 3.0 in Detail Test System Specs Read Performance Write Performance Copy Performance CrystalDiskMark Conclusion Next Page ->