Speed comes at a price

Flash memory-based drives are evolving at a fast pace. While the capacities have gone up considerably, data transfer speeds are also a lot better than before, in general.

Some of the very best drives come from memory manufacturers themselves, and Kingston’s HyperX is one of them.

This drive gets its looks from the blue-black HyperX memory modules. It has an aluminium and rubber casing, and this gives it strength and a good gripping surface. You’re unlikely to drop it, but if you do, the sturdy build will ensure that your data stays safe. The connector is retractable, so just slide it out when you want to use it.

The drive we got for review had 8 GB of storage space; but it’s the performance that interested us more. In HD Tach benchmark this drive showed an access time of 11.9 ms, while the read and write speeds stood tall at 29.6 and 19.8 MBps. In our data transfer tests, we were able to copy 1 GB of sequential data in under a minute. Assorted data (1 GB, 441 files) took about a minute and 46 seconds. We were shocked to find that CPU utilisation jumped when transferring.