Kingston HyperX MAX 3.0

Kingston have released a portable USB drive designed to take advantage of the up-and-coming USB 3.0.

If you’ve ever transferred a large amount of data to or from an external USB drive, you’ll know how mind-numbingly sluggish the USB 2.0 standard actually is. The USB 3.0 standard has about ten times the bandwidth, and has finally started to hit the mainstream with most modern motherboards supporting it. USB 3.0 add-on cards available to upgrade older machines.

The HyperX Max 3.0 series of USB-powered external drives are available in 64GB, 128GB and 256GB capacities, and are effectively just standard 2.5-inch SSD drives with a USB 3.0 connector on them. In fact, photos I’ve seen online of one specimen with its hood popped showed it had exactly the same flash chips and components as a Kingston V+ series SSD, plus a small SATA to USB 3.0 converter board.

Transfer speeds advertised on the packaging claim 195MBytes/sec read speed and 160MBytes/sec write. In testing I actually found that sequential read and write speeds topped out at 200MBytes/s and 180MBytes/sec respectively, so they’re definitely realistic claims.

The HyperX Max 3.0 is fully USB 2.0 compatible so you can use it with older systems too. However, you’ll be capping transfer speeds to around 30MB/sec. You’ll also need to use the Superspeed USB cable that comes with it for power and data transfers, as it won’t work with standard USB cables. In all other respects, it’s a standard plug’n’play external USB drive.

At over $330, the 64GB drive I tested certainly doesn’t compete with older, slower drives price-wise, but if you want blisteringly fast portable storage, then this is the drive for you.