Theres no shortage of USB 3.0 flash drives by now, but disappointingly many of them offer the same kind of write performance as USB 2.0 drives, something that makes them a fairly uninteresting purchase despite the faster read speeds. Kingston has alleviated that issues with its DataTraveler HyperX 3.0 flash drive which is offering some really fast speeds, but at a cost.
USB flash drives have become ubiquitous these days and smaller capacity drives are anything but a splurge. Sadly performance hasnt kept up as fast flash memory and fast controllers add cost and most companies have seemingly decided to keep things on the cheap rather than trying to offer faster performing devices. USB 3.0 was set to change this, but sadly the improvements have been fairly minor in most cases with high-end USB 2.0 drives offering similar write speeds to most USB 3.0 drives.
That said, products like Kingstons new DataTraveler HyperX 3.0 makes it all a bit more worthwhile, as the company is claiming read speeds of SSD level 225MB/s and write speeds of up to 135MB/s when the drive is attached over USB 3.0 whereas over USB 2.0 we should expect to see read/write speeds of 30MB/s. The drive comes in a metal enclosure wrapped in rubber and it has a for the product category impressive five year warranty.
However, theres one caveat, cost. Part of the reason for this is that the DataTraveler HyperX 3.0 starts at 64GB a model that is listed at a whopping US$193 (S$250). Moving up in capacity we have a 128GB going for an eye watering US$377 (S$489) and finally there will be a 256GB model which has as yet to get a price, but wed expect it to be priced way outside of what most people would be willing to spend on a USB 3.0 drive.
In fact, you could get one of Kingstons own 120GB HyperX SATA 6Gbps SSDs for a mere US$273 directly from Kingston and it would be cheaper to get a USB 3.0 enclosure for this than getting one of the new flash drives. So in as much as Kingston has managed to produce some really fast flash drives, if you can live with something a little bit larger, it would actually be more affordable to go down the external SSD route.
Source: Kingston
Nous voilà sans doute en train d'enfoncer des portes ouvertes, mais le fait est que le jeu de stratégie Starcraft II pourrait bel et bien débarquer à la fin de l'année. L'info nous vient cette fois de Mike Morhaime lui-même, président de Blizzard Entertainement. Au cours d'une conférence tenue hier part l'éditeur Activision-Blizzard, le bonhomme a effectivement déclaré que sa société comptait sortir le jeu à cette période. Cela dit, le commentaire était évidemment accompagné des réserves d'usage : sortir Starcraft II à la fin de l'année n'est qu'un objectif et s'il s'avérait que le jeu n'atteignait pas les standards de qualité de Blizzard, la date de commercialisation serait évidemment retardée. En attendant, il reste toujours l'espoir d'être sélectionné pour participer au bêta-test du monstre, toujours prévu pour cet été.
