USB flash drives are loved as convenient forms of portable storage and loathed for their very slow speeds. Remember those spy flicks where you our lovely hero(ine) is risking capture while waiting for ages to transfer a bunch of state secrets on a USB stick. Well, Hollywood producers take note, a new kind of flash drive is in town.
Kingston, maker of all things memory, has unveiled the DataTraveler HyperX 3.0. It’s a USB 3.0 device and promises transfer speeds of up to 225MB/s read and 135MB/s write. These make it by far the fastest USB flash drive out there now. Speed is owed to an 8-channel architecture while the drive is also USB 2.0 backwards compatible but at much slower 30MB/s transfer speeds.
The HyperX brand had so far been reserved for the company’s enthusiast memory and more recently its SSD drive line. Kingston points out that USB 3.0 transfer speeds are good enough so that you can work on large files or launch applications directly from the drive. The drive also offers Windows ReadyBoost support to speed up Windows systems.
The HyperX 3.0 comes in a durable metal and rubberized casing with a 5-year warranty to protect your investment. It comes in three different capacities, 64GB costing $193, 128GB for $377 and $256 for a yet to be determined price. Although costly, prices are not extortionary if you consider the speed and what you would have paid a few years back for similarly sized flash drives.
[Kingston press release]
