INTRODUCTION

   With storage capacity needs increasing all the time it's somewhat expected for people to be on the lookout for higher capacity portable storage media such as USB Flash Drives and Portable Hard Drives. Portable Hard Drives are of course the obvious choice for most consumers not only because in the market one can currently find up to 2TB capacity 2.5" models but also because of the quite low price tags that accompany them. USB Flash drives on the other hand may be a lot smaller and faster (most of the times) compared to PHDs but they do cost much more and are nowhere close to reaching the same capacities. The HyperX PREDATOR 1TB USB 3.0 Flash Drive by Kingston offers the highest available capacity currently at very high read/write speeds and although we had the 512GB model on our test bench when it got launched a while ago we decided to also take a closer look at its larger brother.

   Kingston Technology Company, Inc. is the world’s independent memory leader. Founded in 1987 with a single product offering, Kingston® now offers more than 2,000 memory products that support nearly every device that uses memory, from computers, servers and printers to MP3 players, digital cameras and mobile phones. In 2009, the company's sales reached $4.1 billion. With global headquarters in Fountain Valley, California, Kingston employs more than 4,000 people worldwide. Regarded as one of the “Best Companies to Work for in America” by Fortune magazine, Kingston’s tenets of respect, loyalty, flexibility and integrity create an exemplary corporate culture. Kingston believes that investing in its people is essential, and each employee is a vital part of Kingston’s success. Kingston serves an international network of distributors, resellers, retailers and OEM customers on six continents. The company also provides contract manufacturing and supply chain management services for semiconductor manufacturers and system OEMs.

   When we tested the 512GB variant roughly 11 months ago we found eight 64GB 19nm Toshiba toggle NAND flash modules (the 1TB model should have eight 128GB ones) paired with a Phison PS2251 USB to Flash controller under the hood however according to Kingston they’ve also used Micron NAND modules and Skymedi USB to Flash controllers for the HyperX Predator line of USB 3.0 Flash Drives so it goes without saying that performance will slightly vary according to the "marriage" of components. What we don't know and hope to find out at the end of this review is whether or not the larger capacity NAND Flash Modules will perform faster or slower than the smaller ones found in the 512GB model. Of course there's also the issue of the flash controller used in our sample (could be a Skymedi and not a Phison like the one in our 512GB model) so we can't be certain that our results will be 100% accurate when comparing both the 512GB and the 1TB models but there's not much we can do about that (we couldn’t risk damaging this sample to find out).