DataTraveler HyperX Predator

oh man,, people should know that it is an awesome flash drive!!! omg thanks for saving my life man! i am a music production student and i install my komplete 9 ultimate library which is really huge ,in this drive,, and it works extremely fast, faster than my lap top. i use to use porshe design external hard drive ,they told me that porshe is the fastest one.. but this small cute thing is working better than that... can you believe in this?? and it is really thin. my question was if i put my laptop on the desk, is this product gonna be fit to my lap top ? because you know it is bigger than the normal flash drives. And my lap top is so thin for this flash drive maybe.. and I was gonna send it back if it wouldnt be fit. but it is fit. I use it with my mac book pro retina which is very thin.and it works great.. probably i will never use stupid huge external drives anymore after this.. never ever..and it is my first long comment on Amazon.. I never do that. but I had to tell you guys this is really awesome.. and it is a great experience!! woww

Poor choice. I was swayed by the convenient size of this compared to its storage since I travel a lot. This was a error in judgement on my part. It constantly needs to be scanned for errors .. stops working regularly when attempting to back up... in short is a real headache to use. I have messaged Kingston customer service and never received a reply..Save the trouble .. get a regular External SSD drive.. it will be faster and more reliable then this.My only solace in buying it is that I opted to get the 500 GB instead of dropping the money on the 1 TBThank goodness for that stroke of common sense..

Ever tried putting this in your pocket? I find it constantly with the USB port exposed just waiting to be damaged. Not sure why we couldn't just use a simple cap. Plus, have you ever dropped this in the snow or on a moist surface like grass? It would be nice if the USB port had a cap so moisture and debris doesn't enter (although this hasn't caused an issue yet).

This unit plugs into a Macbook Pro and unfortunately is so thick that it extends below the Macbook Pro case, extending even more than the rubber feet on the laptop. It looks like about 3-4mm or so. This is going to cause a problem of wear and stress inside the socket and the drive as the entire weight of the laptop is now going to be supported on one side by this USB device. Otherwise the metal casing is nice, however it's also heavy and kind of detracts from the cool factor of such a small form factor for 1TB of data. But this form factor mismatch is a "I have to return it" situation for me already because I sure do not want to lose 1TB of data because something wore out from pressure inside this unit, and I sure do not want to have to replace parts in my Macbook Pro because something was binding in the socket and wore out one of two USB ports on the device.Performance: this unit fails to out-perform a LaCie Rugged thunderbolt 1TB HDD... even when the LaCie has an encrypted filesystem, this unit *unencrypted* has only a 20% edge. I bought this unit with the intention of using it for backups while traveling, in order to cut down some carry weight/space. As a result, I don't intend on relying on it unencrypted. The encrypted performance on a Mac is a real disaster.Some real world testing of copying a 9 gigabyte folder of RAW (CR2) and JPG photos.[tally] [samurai/Bridge/models] time cp -R anneva /Volumes/Test0.047u 6.066s 2:55.64 3.4% 0+0k 29+478io 0pf+0w====== 51 MB/sec unencrypted (vs. rating of 160MB/sec writing)Deleting the results, and copying it again resulted in this:0.049u 6.412s 3:54.71 2.7% 0+0k 405+655io 0pf+0w====== 38 MB/sec[tally] [samurai/Bridge/models] time cp -R anneva /Volumes/Hyperbak0.080u 7.938s 10:12.83 1.3% 0+0k 350+694io 0pf+0w====== 14 MB/sec *encrypted* (expected to be slower, but this is a disaster)LaCie thunderbolt 1TB comparison test:[tally] [samurai/Bridge/models] time cp -R anneva /Volumes/Terabak0.076u 7.914s 3:38.61 3.6% 0+0k 399+522io 0pf+0w====== 41 MB/sec *encrypted* (3x faster than the encrypted FS applied to the flash drive)WD My Passport Ultra (with hardware encryption)[tally] [samurai/Bridge/models] time cp -R anneva /Volumes/Ultrabak0.064u 7.867s 2:09.91 6.0% 0+0k 400+500io 0pf+0w====== 70 MB/sec *encrypted* (over 5x faster, and roughly double the best speed of the Predator)Even though the WD is a USB 3.0 device, it beats out the LaCie Thunderbolt as it handles encryption in hardware. This disk is also 2 Terabytes, and is physically maybe 3x the volume of the 1TB Kingston USB stick and is about 15% of the price. So, way faster, more secure, larger storage and cheaper. The only problem is it's a bit bigger, but it's smaller than the LaCie 1TB thunderbolt drive.Since this thing does not come even close to the speed ratings I will be returning it. I know that "your mileage may vary" but we are talking about a factor of 3 in terms of real world performance vs. ratings on this unit and another factor of 3 when running head to head with an encrypted file system vs. a HDD.The discrepancy of 51MB/sec (at best) tested vs. 160MB/sec claimed is in my opinion far too large for a YMMV statement.Note that the LaCie is rated at 110MB/sec and is featuring a factor of 3 slowdown when running encrypted compared to its ratings, vs. the HyperX that has a factor of 10 slowdown compared to its ratings when running encrypted. And of course the WD has builtin encryption and it is blowing everything out of the water for REAL WORLD performance.And I really do stress real world performance. My Macbook Pro has a 1TB SSD on it and that is not bottlenecking anything. It can jam data at these devices as fast as they can accept them. These memory manufacturers are aware of benchmarks and the Kingston Predator seems to ace the benchmarks then it's a lot slower than everything else when writing the files that I need to store.I really don't care about how good an item passes its benchmarks if I can't save my files to it very fast.Given the large price point and the failure to perform in the same ballpark as an HDD, I find it hard to justify owning this device. This is the first of its kind in terms of large size flash drives, but I think they have to be a bit more honest about performance expectations as well as deal with the form factor issue. We are well past the years when you could dismiss Macs as something that not very many people owned. There is no excuse for being off by about 4mm from being able to insert this unit into the socket on the side without causing stress on the device. Using the supplied cable is a hackish workaround to this problem. The goal here is to provide a simpler and smaller device with high performance, compared to a HDD, so being able to plug the device in is one of the reasons why it is being purchased.The size is nice, but big size and really slow is a terrible combination because we're talking about 2 hour backups or 3 hour backups turning into 6 or 9 hours when trying to replace an HDD with this unit in my case. In the case of a backup drive you're writing a lot more than reading, so that write performance is the key figure to care about.There is potential here but I sure would prefer to have this unit without the outer metal shell and a cap. This would let it plug into my Macbook without hanging below the bottom foot and would cut down on the weight and make it even more portable. Also, memory companies know they sell devices by advertising speed ratings, and they owe it to the customers to give us more reliable real world testing instead of whatever theoretical lab-only situation generates these jacked up numbers.So I think you need to be big and slow and cheap, or big and fast and expensive. Big and slow and expensive, I can't buy it. And I don't like rewarding companies that let the marketing department run rampant and make these excessive claims which are not backed up by real world testing.In this world of ours, I am tired of being lied to.(Final note, my system profiler reports the device attached to the Superspeed bus, which is indeed USB 3.0, before anyone posts and complains that I had it hooked up to a USB 2.0 port...)

My challenge is keeping my files in sync between my home and work computers and with the DataTraveler HyperX Predator 1TB I can keep all my files including a huge MS Outlook datafile on one storage device. I'm, however 'coming' from a 120GB Mushkin Ventura Ultra USB Flash Drive (MKNUFDVU120GB) and was expecting similar performance. In contrast to the Ventura Ultra, the DataTraveler is mounted as a "Removal Storage" device in Windows (W7 and W8) and not as a Hard Disk. I'm not sure if that is related to performance but in a one-on-one comparison, the Ventura Ultra largely outperforms the DataTraveler. Both drives are BitLocker encrypted. When I unlock the Mushkin, W7 (64bit with only 8GB RAM) immediately uses the ReadyBoost Cache, whereas with the Kingston, I have to unlock the device, then go into device properties and (re-) configure ReadyBoost. Annoying procedure. I'm hoping to get the new 480GB Mushkin Ventura Ultra once it is released. With this device the ages-old problem of storage-space limitation will certainly re-surface (currently using 429 GB) but it's supposed to outperform even it's smaller equivalents.