Kingston DataTraveler series deliver some amazing sub products for all kind of usage. IT consist of pen drives that are sorted under Personal Drives, Encrypted Secure Drives and Windows To Go Drives. Today we are going to test Kingston HyperX 256GB 3.0 Pen Drive. This one falls under Personal Drives series. USB drives under this are designed to give you good capacity and fast transfer speed. You can get find upto 1TB of portable storage here. Here HyperX means fast and reliable usb drive for long lasting usage. and Kingston is quiet serious about the performance. After having HyperX 256GB in my hand, I found that this one is not only giving you a very large storage space, but constant read and write speed. And above all it does not heat up while transferring data. Most of the pen drives with plastic body and usb 3.0 interface gets really hot when you are moving large chunks of files in it. Compare to them Kingston HyperX 256GB looks very useful and reliable. This drive is available in 64GB, 128GB and 256GB storage choices. There is no model less than 64GB.
Price also varies accordingly. Kingston HyperX 256GB 3.0 Pen Drive is an very costly product. A few site states the cost around Rs.18000 that is simply very high for a usb. And compare to that there are brand that are selling the usb 2.0 version of this much storage under Rs.10000. To some extent this is not in everyone's budget. It looks like an series of exclusive product. The good part here is that you are getting a very high speed storage solution in a portable size. If you own a SSD or external drive then it might not be so comfortable to carry or use. A usb in place of that is lot more easier to use. 256GB storage here can help you to store a lot of files without wasting much time. it offer you a read speed of 225Mb/s on USB 3.0. And 135Mb/s of write speed. After testing out I found this working really well. To get maximum out of the drive you must use in on a usb 3.0 interface.
Specification:
- Capacities1: 64GB, 128GB, 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)
- Practical: durable casing with a solid lanyard loop
- 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
- Guaranteed: Five year warranty with free technical support
- Compatible with: Windows 8.1, Windows 8, Windows 7 (SP1), Windows Vista® (SP1, SP2), Mac OS X v.10.6.x+, Linux v.2.6.x+ (USB 3.0 connectivity requires a USB 3.0 port)
Design:
Kingston HyperX 256GB usb comes with simple package design. It does not bring any additional software or accessory to make the package more attractive. The drive features a simple black and blue design with mixed element of metal and rubber. there are no light indicator on the body. Rubber coating add more to the grip while blue layouts makes it look like a extreme product. You can fix the cap on the backside. It looks like a durable usb.
The thickness is due to the storage capacity. There are lots of flash chips inside to give high storage capacity. Kingston HyperX 256GB usb has a decent look. Being small in size you can carry it quiet easily with you. One benefits we have here is of size. Kingston says nothing much about other durable abilities like waterproof. this is not officially mentioned that this drive have a water resistance design. IT is quiet easy to find a 128GB Pen drive in the market. But I am quite sure it is very hard to locate any other brand that is selling up a high speed 256GB USB. high space adds a lot of comfort. Like other pen drives, transfer speed does not fluctuate on Kingston HyperX 256GB. it remains constant depending on your usb port. it is one of the best option when it comes to full data backup. you can also clone your operating system partition on the same and use it for restoration. Still there is lot of space left in it. Once you have this drive you don’t have to worry about storage problem.
Performance:
After using a while I am quite satisfied with the output of Kingston HyperX 256GB. It works very fast when it comes to file transfer. I have a 3TB 5400rpm hard drive from where I am copying files in the usb. After connecting it shows 238.50GB of maximum space instead of 256GB. So there might be something in the calculation. Because most of the companies count 1000 Bytes as 1KB while our operating system count 1024 bytes as 1KB. For data transfer when I copy data from the Hard disk to Kingston HyperX 256GB I am getting a constant speed of 132MB/s. A 3GB file take around 20 seconds to copy from pc hard drive to the usb. And if I copy data from the pen drive to my hard drive then it gives me a constant speed of 140Mb/s. Here the time of transfer was less.
Unlike other drive the speed does not fluctuate. It remains constant. When you are moving a folder of 50GB or higher than the speed will be a bit less because of hard drive read limitation. The drive will have to load all the files in ram to start transfer. But if you go with small chunks of files like a pack of 10 to 15GB then the maximum speed that I get is around 137MB/s. And if you load more files like around 30 to 40GB at a time the speed starts fluctuating between 54MB/s, 79MB/s, to maximum 137MB/s. For fast transfer you can go with a limited amount of data at once and within seconds those files be in usb drive. In the similar way if I manually move file on a USB 2.0 port then the speed gets limited to 32MB/s. Still this is quiet high compared to a regular usb 2.0 pen drive. Below you can see CrystalDiskMark Test that shows up a high read and write speed.
Conclusion:
Kingston HyperX 256GB 3.0 Pen Drive is an ideal backup solution. It is realizable and can be very beneficial. Due to 256GB storage space you have ample of things to store. You can store HD videos, photos, files, etc without worrying about storage space. USB 3.0 makes it very fast. I am quite surprised to find such an amazing transfer speed. Take few minutes to move 10GB of data in the pen drive. The thing that make the drive a less beneficial is the cost. It is an costly product. The cost is around Rs.18000 approx. The drive is sold for $227.74 on Amazon with free shipping. This makes around Rs.13500 in India. We can expect a bit of price change when the drive appears finally in India on many ecommerce store.
Pros:
- High Read/Write Speed
- Portable Design
Cons:
- Costly
