Kingston HyperX Savage 128 GB USB 3.1 Gen1 Review

Conclusion

When I first received this memory stick I had doubts that this drive would be anything that was truly impressive other than it’s build quality, but I was mistaken. In the past I have found the speeds on a memory stick to be very optimistic, but in terms of sequential performance I have actually found that the HyperX Savage actually can run faster than the speeds that are labeled on the box, which is an impressive feat in itself. 

When buying memory sticks I used to only consider the manufacturer and capacity to be the most important factors, but having used this drive for a while I can really say that the extra speed here is very beneficial in general use, especially given the fact that most computers have USB 3.0 or 3.1 ports now. 

When compared to my Kingston DataTraveler 100, a cheaper Kingston USB 3.1 drive I was amazed at how much more performance the HyperX Savage had to give, with the Savage offering 2x the read performance and 10x the write performance in some tests. This more than justifies the price premium of the HyperX Savage, especially when you consider how much USB drives with these capacities used to cost. 

The only place where this drive falls over is in 4K read and write performance, but this is where every other USB Flash drive I have ever tested has had problems, and is not something that is always encountered in the day-to-day use. This is the only area where this drive really fell behind the SSDs in our graphs, but again this is a problem with USB Flash drives in general.

To put things simply the Kingston HyperX Savage USB 3.1 drive is the fastest USB flash drive that I have ever used and is certainly worth the price premium over the more budget oriented USB drives. This drives offers speeds that put a lot of other USB drives to shame and approaches speeds of even SSDs in some tests, making this a great product to own.

When it comes to award this drive deserves nothing less than the OC3D Gold Award, as it offers fantastic performance that is more than worth the price you have to pay for it and that is not even considering how good this drive looks.  

 

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