HyperX Savage 128GB USB 3.1/3.0 Review

1. Introduction2. Unboxing and First Look3. Synthetic Tests4. Performance Testing5. Conclusion6. View All Pages

Kingston has earned a reputation with its HyperX brand over the last few years. Today, we are taking a look at the HyperX Savage 128GB USB drive, which supports first-generation USB 3.1 technology and promises ‘blazing fast' read and write speeds. How does it hold up? Let's find out!

Kingston claims that the HyperX Savage can achieve 350MB/s read and 250MB/s write speeds. Today we are looking at the 128GB model though there is a lower capacity/lower speed 64GB model, as well as a 256GB model for those who require a lot of space for portable files.

Features and Specifications:

• 350 MB/s read speeds.
• 250 MB/s write speeds.
• USB 3.0/3.1 first gen support.
• Multi-platform compatibility.

The HyperX Savage USB drive comes in a standard blister pack for packaging. It gives you a good look at the drive, capacity and read/write speeds before buying and gets the job done.

 

Inside you will find the drive itself, a HyperX sticker and a little strap so that you can attach the drive to something like a set of keys so that you don't lose it.

While the older HyperX Fury USB drives ship in a plastic housing, Kingston has stepped up its build materials for the Savage drives with an aluminium X and rubberized plastic used to protect the internals. Overall, it's a good looking USB drive with a premium finish to it.

As you can see, once the drive is formatted you get 117GB of space to play around with.

While real world benchmarks are a better look at what you can expect to get out of a product, synthetic ones are good for quotable numbers and the reliability of repeatable tests.

So for our Synthetic tests, we ran the HyperX Savage 128GB USB through CrystalDiskMark and the Atto Disk Benchmark. Each test will be performed twice via USB 3.0 and 2.0 to ensure accuracy.

 

As you can see, this batch of synthetic tests shows that the Kingston HyperX Savage 128GB USB drive has very close performance to what is advertised on the box over a USB 3.0 connection, which is very impressive.

 

USB 2.0 performance is limited, with speeds hovering just under the 45 MB/s mark for both read and write. This is quite the performance hit compared to USB 3.0 but should still hold up well against other USB 2.0 drives.

The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is only compatible with Windows. It essentially measures your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. You can use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives.

 

Our ATTO results remain consistent across both tests, showing very high read speeds with lower writes in comparison. This test was performed on USB 3.0.

For real world benchmarking, we take several custom made folders full of different types of files of varying sizes and time their transfer to and from the device – thereby determining its read and write speed. For the first test, we used 8GB of MKV video files. On all of our tests, the files were transferred from a Kingston V300 240GB SSD.

As you can see from our performance results, the Kingston HyperX Savage is quite the performer when it comes to large file transfers with read and write speeds similar to what is advertised on the box. However, we did see things dip in the 1GB image transfer test.

The Kingston HyperX Savage is a handy device to have around. Not only does it offer 128GB of portable storage but it is also capable of hitting high read and write speeds which means you shouldn't have to wait around long waiting for files to transfer. Obviously, the USB 2.0 numbers are lower, which is to be expected.

USB 3.0 results were all consistently high and we were quite impressed with them. To top it all off, Kingston has really stepped up in terms of build quality here as well, with a solid metal ‘X' enclosing the device and protecting it from potential damage. The use of rubberised plastic was also a nice touch.

You can pick up the Kingston HyperX Savage 128GB model that we tested here today on Amazon for £54.99 though stock does appear to be quite limited right now. The price may seem quite high for a USB stick but you do get a decent chunk of performance for your money.

You can also find this USB drive available directly through Kingston for £60. This drive is also available in 64GB and 256GB capacities as well.

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Pros:

• Build quality.
• Fast read/write speeds.
• USB 3.1

Cons:

• A bit pricey.

KitGuru Says: If you need high-speed portable storage, then the Kingston HyperX Savage is a great option. 

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