Kingston DataTraveler HyperX 16GB

Full Review

Kingston has branded this drive (model number DTHX2/16GB) as one for the enthusiast. Its blue-and-black styling, a sleek capless design with a retractable USB connector, and the HyperX branding do help reinforce this image. It didn’t manage to be fast enough to snatch the top spot, though it does manage to be priced quite well. Perhaps for those who don’t like the down-sides of a pendrive with a rubberized body, Kingston has chosen to go with a plastic-and-metallic finish for the casing. In synthetic benchmarks, it gave a read speed average of 29.1 MBps, read access time average of 2.2 ms, and CPU utilization of 9 percent. Real-world read speed tests also showed the same speed as in the benchmarks, for large and small files, when files were copied from the flash drive to a fast hard disk drive. Thus, synthetic benchmarks were consistent with real-world speeds in read tests. But write speeds for the purposes that a pendrive is put to, can be better judged through real-world tests. To see how it performs in real world usage, we transferred files to the flash drive from a hard disk. Writing large files (over 1 GB in size) to the flash drive results in a speed of 9.49 MBps. The speed of writing multiple small files (1.46 GB, 124 files of varying sizes) declines to 8.74 MBps (as expected). As with all flash drives we’ve seen so far, this drive doesn’t heat up to any noticeable level, even after prolonged use, and a fall from a desk to the floor doesn’t kill it (doing the same to a portable USB hard drive can be fatal to it). Kingston offers a warranty of five years on this flash drive.

Bottom Line

The blue-and-black styling along with the HyperX branding make it a premium drive. The retractable USB connector prevents lost caps. Performs well, but was out-beaten in real-world tests.