1. Features, specifications
Kingston's HyperX brand has been a choice for power users and the DataTraveler HyperX 3.0 Flash drive
we have in our hands today has been designed to continue a solid tradition by featuring the fastest speeds and largest
capacities Kingston offers for portable storage.
The DataTraveler HyperX 3.0 provides USB 3.0 data transfer speeds and capacities up to 256GB, making it a potential solution for expanding a notebook’s
storage and for quickly storing, transferring and backing up any digital file. The drive's sequential read and write speeds are up to 225MB/s read, 135MB/s write (USB 3.0), it supports ReadyBoost and is backed by a 5-years warranty.
Specifications
- Capacities : 64GB - DTHX30/64GB, 128GB - DTHX30/128GB, 256GB - DTHX30/256GB
- Dimensions: 2.952" x 0.916" x 0.626" (74.99mm x 23.29mm x 15.9mm)
- Operating Temperature: 32°F to 140°F (0°C to 60°C)
- Storage Temperature: -4°F to 185°F (-20°C to 85°C)
- Speed:
USB 3.0: 225MB/s read and 135MB/s write
USB 2.0: 30 MB/s read and 30MB/s write
- Backwards Compatible with USB 2.0
- ReadyBoost Support
- Five year warranty with free technical support
- Compatible with: Windows 8, Windows 7 (SP1), Windows Vista (SP1, SP2), Windows XP (SP3), Mac OS X v.10.6.x+, Linux v.2.6.x+ (USB 3.0 connectivity requires a USB 3.0 port)
2. Unboxing
The Kingston DataTraveler HyperX 3.0 64GB retails in online stores for about €80~100. Considering its fast speeds, the price is normal and for a 64GB USB3.0 flash drive.
Below you see the drive's package:
The Kingston DataTraveler HyperX 3.0 is not very compact in size, mainly due to the thick casing and the number of NAND pieces inside.The drive has a plastic cap with a rubbery texture. Kingston uses a blue paint with a black finish as it has done with other members of its drive a HyperX family of products:
The Kingston Data Traveler is using an 8-Channel memory architecture, which increases the throughput of data between flash drive and the USB controller.
The drive's cap can be attached to the back side of the drive and.:
3. Benchmarks
We ran the benchmarks on the following PC:
- Intel i5-2500K with default cooler
- Gigabyte Z77X-D3H with the latest available bios
- 4x2GB Kingston 2133MHz HyperX rated memories
- Seagate 7200.12 500GB 7200rpm
- Windows 7 x64 SP1 with all latest updated installed
The Kingston DataTraveler HyperX 3 64GB comes pre-formatted (FAT32) and offers 58.8GB of free storage:.
We used the latest CrystalDiskMark 3.0.2 to get an idea of the drive's sequential speeds. While the drives' specs rate this drive at 225MB/sec reading, 135MB/sec writing, the CrystalDiskMark gave higher speeds at both tests. The 512K/4K/4K QD32 writing speeds were somewhat low, as it typically happens with most USB flash drives:
The 0-fill test returned lower performance in all the tests.
Passing to the AS SSD Benchmark, we confirmed the sequential reading/writing speeds of the flash drive. But the 4K/4K-64Thrd scores remained very low, meaning you'll have to wait more when you are dealing with small files.
Below you see the drive's reading and writing performance with files partially or fully compressed:
The ATTO Disk Benchmark confirmed the drive;s slow performance with small files. The drive's performance peaked with 64KB and 128KB files:
4. Final thoughts
In our tests the Kingston DataTraveler HyperX 3.0 64GB flash drive peaked at 259MB/s read and 149MB/s write with sequential transfers. Random transfers were lower, meaning that the drive has been designed mainly for moving large media files around instead of using this as a system drive.
Real-world file benchmarks scored extremely well. The HyperX drive was able to transfer 9GB of data in less than two minutes and it took just over a minute to transfer 6GB of data.
The five-year warranty of the drive adds piece of mind and we had to complain about something, it would be the drive's rather big size, at least compared with other flash drives. The above-average width would obstruct adjacent ports of your laptop, so that's worth bearing in mind if your laptop's I/O ports are particularly close together.
In case you have more money to spend, Kingston also offers a 256GB of the drive :-)
The good
- Very fast sequential transfer speeds with large files
- High capacities offered ranging from 64GB to 256GB
- Durable design
- Five year warranty
he bad
- Weak random write speeds
- Big size
