CONCLUSION

   When we received the HyperX Savage 128GB USB 3.1 Gen 1 flash drive by Kingston roughly 2+ months ago although we all knew it was basically a renamed USB 3.0 drive we didn’t feel it’d be right to test it on a USB 3.0 compatible mainboard so although we finished a round of tests with it we informed Kingston that we’d like to wait until we got a USB 3.1 Gen 1/2 compatible PCIe card. Why am I even mentioning this? Well it so happens that by using the Lycom USB 3.1 card we recorded a performance boost of 10-15% across all tests (for example 272MB/s vs 336MB/s read average in HD Tune Pro and 294MB/s vs 325MB/s read average in ATTO) so although the drive doesn’t really need a USB 3.1 Gen 2 compatible card there’s definitely some benefit in using it with one (of course once we update our test rig with the upcoming Intel Core i7-6930k I’m very curious to see how that onboard USB 3.1 Gen 2 controller will compare to early ones like the one used in the Lycom card).

   Kingston has currently set the price of the HyperX Savage 128GB USB 3.1 Gen 1 flash drive at USD84.66 inside the USA (Amazon.com) and at 70Euros inside the EU (Amazon.co.uk) so it doesn’t really cost much. Certainly you can currently find many lower cost 128GB USB 3.0 flash drives in the market but let’s face it, leaving the entire renaming of USB 3.0 to USB 3.1 Gen 1 there aren’t that many models that can even come close to the performance of the HyperX Savage 128GB and that’s why it gets our Platinum Award.

PROS

- Build Quality
- Top Of The Charts Performance
- Design
- Also Available In 512GB
- Overall Size
- Price/Performance Ratio
- 5 Year Warranty

CONS

- None