Now besides the technical stuff, the drive itself is sturdy which I like. Sure, you are not going into a war zone with it, or maybe you are, but just carrying around a thumb drive, you can find yourself dropping it or you dropping on it. ~J.A. Laraque

Kingston DataTraveler HyperX 3.0 Thumb Drive

So how do you test a thumb drive? The answer is pretty much the same way you test any other data drive, with software that tests read and write speeds.  We can tell you right from the start that the Kingston DataTraveler HyperX 3.0 Thumb Drive lives up to the name Hyper by writing at 135MB per second and reading at 225MB per second. So what does this mean in the real world or better yet, what does this mean for a gamer?

It’s pretty simple. Say you play M.A.M.E games or other old school games and want to be able to play them anywhere. Having a fast thumb drive with a lot of space allows this. The version we tested was 64GB which is incredible considering my first ever hard drive was 750MBs and cost me over $350. You can find this drive for about $65 on places like Newegg. So while it might be a little more expensive than your normal 4 to 8GB thumb drives, you are going for two things here, speed and space.

When transferring large files you will sometimes find yourself wanting this done in a hurry which is where USB 3.0 comes in. USB 3.0 is the latest standard and is about 10 times faster than 2.0 and this drive is even faster than your normal 3.0 USB drives. So for instance, if you had 12GBs of games to transfer, it might take up to 40 minutes with a USB 2.0 drive, six minutes with a standard 3.0 drive and 3 minutes with the DataTraveler HyperX. The question is, how important is your time?

Now read and write speeds differ because a thumb drive does not have all the components of say a SSD drive, but this is not really an issue when you are playing a game or watch a movie from your drive. I did both, even HD movies and it ran as smoothly as on my SSD at home. Don’t worry if you don’t have USB 3.0, it works with USB 2.0 but obviously it won’t be able to take advantage of the speeds you would get from 3.0.

Now besides the technical stuff, the drive itself is sturdy which I like. Sure, you are not going into a war zone with it, or maybe you are, but just carrying around a thumb drive, you can find yourself dropping it or you dropping on it. The good thing is the outer shell protects it and even with the protection it fits perfectly on different devices, not taking up space or blocking other ports. I personally like that you can clip the cover on the thumb drive while it’s plugged in because I have lost a lot of covers that way.

So you know from my other reviews that it comes down to cost. It is like this, when you combine, USB 3.0, faster than basic speeds and 64GBs you will get a higher price point. If you never transfer a lot of data and you don’t care about speed then a smaller more basic thumb drive is for you. However, if you are always transferring data, running applications and media from your drive and time is of great importance than the HyperX DataTraveler HyperX 3.0 64GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive is a great choice and totally not obsolete.

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