Legit Reviews

Kingston DataTraveler HyperX Predator 512GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive Review

Kingston recently announced the DataTraveler HyperX Predator 3.0 USB Flash drive. This drive is available in 512GB and 1TB capacities and is fast, with speeds of up to 240MB/s read and 160MB/s write. We managed to get our hands on the Kingston DataTraveler HyperX Predator 512GB drive and put it to the test to see how it performs!

At the end of the day, we found the Kingston DataTraveler HyperX Predator USB 3.0 512GB Flash Drive (DTHXP30/512GB) to pretty damn impressive. When we started Legit Reviews in 2002 we were reviewing 8MB and 16MB USB 2.0 drives and here we are more than ten years later reviewing 512GB USB 3.0 Flash drives! The need and functionality of USB Flash drives have not changed over the past decade, but the capacities and speeds they are available at keep increasing every year...

Article Title: Kingston DataTraveler HyperX Predator 512GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive Review
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/2124/1/
Pricing at Time of Print: $855.73 plus shipping

What do you even do with a drive that big? I don't even have that much stuff stored on my NAS.

I'm sure some people could fill it!

Someone had to push the boundaries. Hopefully this will force others to make their own larger drives to compete (in turn lower prices for us).

A few things:
1- Why ship a drive this big with FAT32. They have to know people are going to put files larger than 4GB on the drive. Some people simply don't know that you can't and get errors thrown at them. They should've shipped it with exFAT, my personal opinion.

2- See 3 initially for the drive used. I was playing around with exFAT and NTFS to see which yielded better results. By far the faster of the formats was exFAT. Any idea why that is (maybe different allocation settings with the different files systems?)?

3- I recently picked up an A-DATA Nobility N005 Pro 64GB (advertised speeds 170/90). I ran it through ATTO, HD Tune, and Flash Memory Toolkit and the results were A LOT slower than the advertised speeds. Using Windows 7 I transferred a single 3GB RAR file to and from the drive and results were much better. I was getting 170 MB/s reads and closer to 90 MB/s writes. I'm not sure why the benchmark programs were struggling with the drive.

Windows limits USB 3.0 speeds...I don't recall the specifics (something about sequential file size transfer limits) but you need to use turbo software or tweak the registry to unlock the full potential. Google it a bit, i'm sure you'll find the explanation pretty easily.

The conversion from physical GB to the virtual GiB is why there is a difference.

Nothing virtual with that, both refer to the same amount of bytes available to the user.

Actual in-chip bytes ("physical" ones) would be the ones taking into account overprovisioning and compression, which sure would be an interesting bit to know about these pendrives, seeing how they look more like small factor SSDs. Also whether they are SLC, MLC or TLC.

jarfil wrote:

The conversion from physical GB to the virtual GiB is why there is a difference.

Nothing virtual with that, both refer to the same amount of bytes available to the user.

Actual in-chip bytes ("physical" ones) would be the ones taking into account overprovisioning and compression, which sure would be an interesting bit to know about these pendrives, seeing how they look more like small factor SSDs. Also whether they are SLC, MLC or TLC.

True... still tough to explain to many why there is a difference though. Not sure the best way to word it so the average consumer understands.

Let's just say it's lost in translation
But i believe on SSDs it might be lost in translation too as well as over-provisioning as such