Space is what we all want. We desire more space because more space would let us add more stuff. Yes, it is always like a bigger jar equals the prospect of adding more cookies in it. What we want to convey is that, since we all use computers, tablets or cell phones, storage has been one of the most important things influencing the decision of buyers. This is perfectly plausible because the amount of content we come across daily is staggering. One of the most consumed type of content is multimedia which requires a whole lot more space than documents or spreadsheets for that matter. The internet provides us with so much content especially in the form of torrents that we are sure most of us have our hard drives filled with TV soap operas, movies, music and whatnot (torrents are to blame here..well not really!). But what about portable storage? A lot of us receive data from our friends and relatives and so we usually need a portable storage medium to transfer it. And no, regular 4GB to 16GB pen drives just don’t cut it when it comes to transferring huge files and this is where thumb drives like the Kingston DataTraveler HyperX 3.0 come into picture. Thumb drives or pen drives as most people call them make life easy in the sense that they are much smaller than external hard drives or portable drives for that matter. Just take a pen drive, slide it in your pocket and you’re good to go. This helps most of us who move to and fro between our work and home and always need to carry our important files along with us.
The DataTraveler HyperX 3.0 256GB from Kingston is one such drive that is not only small but is built very well. The pen drive has the signature HyperX design element to it with metallic blue coloured accents along the sides of the drive. The design is complemented by the addition of an X-like rubber design which adds more durability to the pen drive. Looking at the drive, anyone will feel that Kingston has done a good job while designing it as the drive looks nice and has grip because of the rubber coating. The drive uses a standard albeit a good pull to open cap which also has the same HyperX design to it along with pull grips at the sides. According to Kingston, the DataTraveler HyperX 256GB is shock-resistant and we verified their claim by drop testing this pen drive multiple times and it still worked perfectly. Since the Kingston DataTraveler HyperX is a thumb drive that supports the USB 3.0 standard, it’s very fast and this can be witnessed by checking out the performance results of the drive.
Performance:
We used CrystalDiskMark and ran the Random as well as 0x00 Fill benchmarks for 5 passes of 1000MB and the results we received for both sequential and 4K were good with read and write speeds of 250.9MB/s and 137.6MB/s respectively in sequential which is a good thing when it comes to sequential file transfer. You can also take a look at the Random fill and 0x00 fill scores received by the Kingston DataTraveler HyperX 3.0 256GB in CrystalDiskMark below:
The next synthetic benchmark on our list of benchmarks was SiSoft Sandra 2013 as the test gave an accurate device score with a graph of the performance of the thumb drive. See the test result image below:
Though synthetic tests are important when it comes to running storage benchmarks, real world tests are equally important. For real world tests, we used 4GB and 20GB single as well as assorted file samples to check the transfer time taken during both read and write operations on the drive. We used a stopwatch to accurately measure the transfer time taken for each of the operations performed on the drive and made a note of them.
Here are the timings for all the real world file transfer tests:
4GB Single Write: 31.50 secs
4GB Single Read: 11.21
4GB Assorted Write: 1 min 12 sec 28
4GB Assorted Read: 10.11 sec
20GB Single Write: 2min 32 sec 85
20GB Single Read: 1min 23 sec 23
20GB Assorted Write: 6min 36 sec 16
20GB Assorted Read: 1 min 29 sec 17
Looking at the real world test results, we must say that the Kingston DataTraveler does a great job at transferring files and that too at a blazing fast speed. Since, quick file transfer is the base criteria for a drive (especially a pen drive) to be considered good, the Kingston DataTraveler HyperX 3.0 256GB is a charm when it comes to meeting that primary requirement and is a nice portable storage option to be considered for your day to day file transfer demands.
This was our take on the Kingston DataTraveler HyperX 3.0 256GB pen drive. We’ll cover a few other Kingston products in the coming weeks as well, so stay tuned and watch this space for more details. Also check out our unboxing and first look video of the Kingston DataTraveler HyperX 3.0 256GB pen drive below:
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Promotional Feature
For the second part of the 30 Days campaign with Kingston you can read about the HyperX 3K 120GB SSD here.