Review: Kingston DataTraveler HyperX 64GB USB 3.0 is a Pocket SSD

Benchmarks - Synthetic and Real World


CrystalDiskMark
In 64-bit version of Crystal Disk Mark, we effectively had a very mixed bag of results. When it came to flash drives, the Kingston DataTraveler actually surpassed expectations and posted sequential speeds of 239.9 MB/s read and 156 MB/s write in contrast to the stated 225 MB/s and 135 MB/s. Furthermore, in the 512K reads, the HyperX Drive beat out everything by a pretty considerable margin with the Corsair voyager coming in 23 MB/s slower (14%). We must note, though that the Seagate GoFlex Desk 4TB did have better sequential writes and 512K writes than all of the USB flash drives by a HUGE margin, but that is primarily because that is a comparison between a hard drive and a flash drive... and the 4TB drive is one of the fastest hard drives on the planet.



Taking that into account, though, we see that the Kingston HyperX USB drive actually suffers quite a bit in 4K performance as do most of the drives. Although, we must say that the Corsair Voyager GT 32GB did have considerably better performance in 4K reads than essentially all of the other competition. The 4K writes were essentially flat across the board, except for the Seagate GoFlex Desk 4TB which came in significantly faster than all of the competition once again primarily because of the fact that hard drives perform better than flash drives in this scenario.

ATTO Disk Benchmark 2.46

In ATTO, there really isn't much to look at as this is really more of a theoretical performance check and really isn't necessarily indicative of real world performance whatsoever. With that said, we managed to attain speeds in excess of 255 MB/s read and over 155 MB/s write. This is in comparison with the Corsair Voyager GT which managed a maximum read of 147 MB/s and a write of 46 MB/s. Meanwhile, with the Seagate GoFlex Desk we got 188 MB/s read and write on ATTO. In this sense, the Kingston HyperX really shines and shows its value over basically everything that is considered portable (even a 4TB enclosure).

AIDA64



Here we tested the USB drive's read abilities in both USB 3.0 and 2.0. As you can see in USB 2.0 mode, it gets a pretty consistent 33 MB/s which is essentially the max any good USB flash drive can get on a USB 2.0 port. Now, looking at the USB 3.0 read speeds we can see that the beginning speed for this drive is 238.6 MB/s and it finally ends at 241 MB/s but with a random read the drive gets as fast as 277.7 MB/s.



In the linear write test, we see that the drive achieves speeds averaging at 148.7 MB/s with a maximum of 151 MB/s and a minimum of 145 MB/s all still extremely fast considering that this is a very strenuous test and generally makes slow drives screech to a halt.

Real World Read/Write Test - 2.7GB 1080P Video File



In this test, we discovered the importance of a good USB controller and a fast SSD as we really managed to find the real world performance seemed to vary drastically between systems and controllers. In our findings, the Kingston HyperX drive was without a doubt the fastest drive for reading data giving is real world speeds nearing the theoretical ones we saw in our synthetic benchmarks like ATTO. We saw a transfer rate of 247 MB/s average on one of our tests which was absolutely exciting.

For writes, though, the Seagate GoFlex 4TB gave better results beating both of the Kingston drives by 5 seconds or more. Admittedly, when comparing the current generation Kingston USB 3.0 drive against the previous generation we can see that performance has essentially doubled along with the capacity as well.