Customer Reviews

Kingston 8GB USB 2.0 Super Hi-Speed DataTraveler HyperX 20MB/sec Write (DTHX/8GB)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is by far the best USB flash drive I have used in a long time. The read/write speed is amazingly fast compared to your normal consumer level drive.

It is a little on the bigger side, but not excessive in any means. It also does not block any of your other USB ports :).

I have many usb flash drives, but I need really fast one to use it as hard disk. I started to search from 16GB upto 64GB. But those big capacity ones have slow speed especially for lots of small file writing. I ended up choosing this one. This is really fast. You can't compare this to the others with speed. I would have give it 5 stars if the housing is a little thinner. It's hard to insert this to my macbook air. I have to push it hard to connect to air because there are gaps between usb socket and housing. It feels like that one day I may break the usb part of my air.

Sleek design with retracting connector. The main down side is the little blue LED light on the side that shows that the device has successfully connected, or is transmitting or receiving data, ALWAYS seems to be on the wrong side, where it cannot be easily seen.

I bought this USB drive in March of 2008, when it was almost $100 more. For the current price, it's a heck of a deal. This USB drive is much faster than many of the other USB drives currently on the market, including from Kensington. The higher capacity drives (32gb and 64gb) have not achieved the transfer speed of the Hyperx drive. It works in both my Mac computer at home and my PC at work without any problems. The slide feature means never having to worry about the cap. If you need an 8GB drive, seriously consider the Kensington Hyperx. You may spend a little more (not nearly as much as I did) but you will not be disappointed.

I bought this after also buying a 4gb Sandisk Cruzer Contour, because I had been lusting after the Datatraveler HyperX for a while (but price had been exorbitant). I will compare the two, since they are the only two currently on the market that tout speed as well as capless design.

When I finally got it I was underwhelmed. The width is less than the Contour (making it good for horizontally aligned USB ports), but the thickness is greater (bad for vertical arrangements). It is far lighter, which makes it feel flimsy, but I realize that really doesn't mean much. The blue is anodized aluminum, and very scratch proof (superior to the Contour in this respect), and the black is rubberized, although it makes me worry that it will eventually rub off and look/feel shoddy. The switch to slide out the connector is a little hard to slide but is ok. I like the Contour's slider better.

Unfortunately, while the specs and price would lead you to believe that this is at least as fast, if not faster than the Contour, such was not the case. I tested it extensively on a dell laptop, Macbook Pro, and PC desktop, using large collections of files (using both a single 2gb file, as well as testing it with a lot of smaller files totallying ~2gb) and timing the copy/move operations. I repeated the tests and obtained consistent results. I found that while the Kingston was sometimes a tad faster, the Contour beat it just as frequently. The Contour was much faster with small files.

Most notably, I've noticed the HyperX is much slower in everyday use. Also in the Mac finder it has a weird problem where assigning a custom disk icon takes forever to refresh. Maybe the hardware uses some sort of caching or something... because I did several icon refreshes, and even ejected it several times before it updated to display the new icon. (Might just be a Finder issue).

This Kingston HyperX replaces a couple of Sandisk Micro Cruzers that refused to work in my Vista Ultimate x64 PC. Even after removal of the U3 software and repartitioning. The HyperX is the fastest USB flash drive I have ever used - comparable to reading/writing to a hard drive. Works well with both Vista 32 and 64. I'm very pleased with this product and recommend it to anyone looking for more speed from their USB flash drive.

Expensive, but quick, compact, slider means no worry re caps. Would do it again