Kingston HyperX MAX USB 3.0 128GB External SSD Review

Synthetic Benchmarks

ATTO v2.41 Benchmark

ATTO is one of the oldest drive benchmarks still being used today and is still very relevant in the SSD world. ATTO measures transfers across a specific volume length. It measures raw transfer rates for both reads and writes and places the data into graphs that can be very easily interpreted. The test was run with the default runs of 0.5kb through 8192kb transfer sizes with the total length being 256mb.

Benchmark Results: We know from our test of the V+100 drive, the components are more than capable of exceeding the results we see here. Obviously the USB 3.0 interface is being maxed out at just over 200MB/s which is still a vast improvement over the USB 2.0 speeds but does hamstring the drive a bit. The scores outpace the specifications given by Kingston.

AS-SSD Benchmark

We have been running the AS-SSD Benchmark app for over a year now and found that it gives a broad result set. Many testers are using the 4k file size read/write results for the IO Meter benchmark which is an old tool and the AS-SSD benchmark essentially shows the same metric in its results set. The programmer worked very hard on this software and continues to make updates often so if you use it, show him some love.

Benchmark Results: Again, we see lesser numbers than the SATA equivalent connected drive but still very speedy for an external drive and slightly above Kingston’s rated specifications.

CrystalDiskMark 3.0.0h

CrystalDiskMark is a small benchmark utility for drives and enables
rapid measurement of sequential and random read/write speeds. Note that
CDM only supports Native Command Queuing (NCQ) with a queue depth of 32
(as noted) for the last listed benchmark score. This can skew some
results in favor of controllers that also do not support NCQ.

Benchmark Results: CrystalDiskMark more or less echos what we saw with the ATTO and is obviously limited by the interface. Again, we see performance above what has been advertised by Kingston.

Let’s have a look at what happens with some real world tests.