Kingston DataTraveler HyperX Predator 512GB Review

Introduction

USB sticks, thumb drives, pen drives, call them what you will their usefulness cannot be overstated. In these times when most of us have at the least a computer and a console, but far more likely we have a couple of computers, a laptop, maybe one or two consoles, a TV with USB in etc., the need to be able to move large media around quickly and simply is vital. USB sticks are light, portable and usually big enough for most of our requirements. 

However, the main problem has always been speed. The first few were USB 2.0 models and those were hideously slow for anything other than putting a couple of pictures on to take round your Aunts, or moving documents between home and the office. USB 3.0 helped a bit and finally brought us the chance to move films around, albeit we have to wait an age for them to transfer.

As digital media becomes an ever larger part of our lives, more and more of us possess devices capable of outputting enormous pictures, or HD movies, or even just want to take our portable games with us when we go, then the need for ever larger and ever faster sticks has become paramount. Sure a cloud-based storage system is a nice idea and perhaps useful if you live in two or three really big cities that have amazing internet connections, but so few of us have that benefit and even then the "FedEx bandwidth" still vastly outperforms that of the internet.

Kingston are probably the biggest name in the memory world, and today we're taking a look at their latest product, the DataTraveler HyperX Predator. To say this is a premium product is almost doing it a disservice, promising a blend of SATA2 transfer speeds, HDD capacity and USB stick portability. Is this really all things to all men?

Technical Specifications

For our testing today we're going to be putting the DT HyperX up against a fast USB stick to see if the extra cost brings extra performance. We'll also be sticking it in our SATA3 SSD graphs, not for a comparison because that would be unfair, but just to see if the Kingston can ever come close to some of the very fastest drives around.

• 240MB/s read and 160MB/s write (USB 3.0)
• Massive capacity of up to 1TB (coming soon)
• USB 3.0 functionality, backwards compatible with USB 2.0
• Exclusive metal casing with custom key ring and HyperX Valet Keychain
• Supports Windows® 8, Windows® 7, Vista®, XP, Linux & Mac