Kingston HyperX MAX USB 3.0 128GB External SSD Review

Real World Testing

One of the most common operations performed on a PC is moving/copying files. Using a free application called Teracopy, we performed some file copy operations to gauge the drive performance in a real world setting. Teracopy allows us to objectively measure the time of transfer. The OS drive in used to copy to and from is the OCZ Revo X2 SSD drive which is extremely fast and will not cause an artificial bottleneck.

We first took a 1GB .m4v movie file and timed the operation of writing to and reading from the Kingston HyperX MAX drive in USB 3.0 mode.

1GB FILE USB 3.0 WRITE:

1GB FILE USB 3.0 READ:

We then took the same 1GB file and repeated the operations but this time using the USB 2.0 interface just to showcase the difference in speeds than USB 3.0. Everyone knows 2.0 is slower but it’s always nice to see it illustrated.

1GB FILE USB 2.0 WRITE:

1GB FILE USB 2.0 READ:

Benchmark Results: As you can see the difference is painfully obvious between USB 2.0 and 3.0 where the writes are 7x’s faster. Just over 5 seconds to write a 1GB file is great!

We also did a local copy where it reads and writes on the same source HyperX MAX drive which tests the controller and cache on simultaneous read/write operations.

1GB FILE USB 3.0 READ/WRITE:

Next, we used the same collection of MP3 files as we have used for other SSD tests
which is comprised of various file sizes that total 4.65GB
collectively. These file types were chosen due to their wide use and
mixture of file sizes and compression levels.

4.65GB FILES – USB 3.0 WRITE:

First we performed a write from the RevoDrive X2 to the HyperX MAX.

4.65GB FILES – USB 3.0 READ:

Next, we performed a read from the HyperX to the RevoDrive X2 and finally a read/write local to the HyperX MAX.

4.65GB FILES – USB 3.0 READ/WRITE:

Benchmark Results: The read and write tests were pretty close to each other in terms of time of transfer at around 32-40 seconds each. The simultaneous read/write yielded a longer copy time by adding another 35 to 43 seconds but still extremely fast for 4.65GB of data!