Some time ago, we got acquainted with the state of affairs on the SSD market worldwide and confirmed once again that the acceptance of new technology doesn’t come with their appearance, but with a low price tag. Well, USB 3.0 seems to have followed a similar path. Almost all new motherboards have this technology implemented, but these ports are likely to remain empty for quite some time, at least until the prices of compatible devices drop to a reasonable level. On the other hand, portable disks are rapidly rising in numbers, the technology matured long ago, and the only thing changing is the capacity and special features. Kingston’s engineers have decided to blend all three aforementioned theses into a single product, presenting us with HyperX Max USB 3.0 64 GB portable drive.

The idea is very simple. USB 3.0 provides a far larger data transfer rate than standard hard disks are able to even utilise, so the only logical solution, RAID stripes and SCSI exotics aside, seems to be SSDs. Putting an SSD into an external enclosure that connects to the PC via anything slower than eSATA is completely pointless. During our recent testing of external USB 3.0 enclosures, we used fast SSDs in order to underline the full potential of this connection type between a drive and a PC; at the time, we mentioned that it was a matter of weeks before SSDs with a USB 3.0 connector would appear, and it turns out that we were right.

The purpose of this kiddo, presented at the end of last year, is fairly simple. As seen from its name, this external SSD belongs to Kingston’s HyperX product family, traditionally aimed at enthusiasts and those that wish to bring out the best in their hardware. This product’s three chief features - performance, portability and durability - are a logical consequence of using a high-quality aluminium enclosure with USB 3.0. The final product of this mix is a very fast, durable, and most of all, compact portable storage device.

We received the representative with the lowest capacity, but also the lowest price, for testing purposes. Firstly, we were able to finally confirm our suspicious concerning the way manufacturers declare average transfer speeds for their storage products. Our very own HyperX Max prides itself on a supposed average reading speed of 195 MB/s and a writing speed of 160 MB/s, which seems like a respectable result. However, only a single application was able to yield results close to these - ATTO Bench, and even that only when working with the largest file size. The SSD scored lower in literally all other benchmark tools. Therefore, it’s clear that engineers assemble the product, run all possible applications to measure performance, take the highest score, check for consistency and errors and then present such a result as the product’s actual performance. This is the case with the ATTO Bench application as well, where the device actually scored the claimed numbers, albeit under very specific circumstances. Actual performance is about 30% lower in other benchmark applications, as well as real-world tasks.

Don’t get us wrong, the results achieved by HyperX Max are phenomenal, it’s just that we have to underline the unavoidable difference between what is stated on the box and what you’ll really get when you take the device home. It’s all but futile to explain the difference to the salesperson afterwards, when the device really does score the proclaimed transfer rates, as far as ATTO Bench and its 8 MB file benchmark test is concerned.