Home / Peripheral / Drive Caddy / Kingston HyperX Max 3.0 128GB Drive Review

Kingston HyperX Max 3.0 128GB Drive Review

Rating: 9.0.

Kingston have impressed us recently with many of their products, especially the low cost, high performance SSDNow V100 128GB SSD drive. Today we are looking at their new external storage solution called HyperX MAX 3.0 which utilises the latest USB 3.0 superspeed interface.

According to Kingston the HyperX Max 3.0 drives (MLC) can achieve speeds of up to 195 MB/s read and 160 MB/s write which will be tantalizingly desirable for demanding performance users on the move. The life expectancy of the drive is said to be 1,000,000 hours and it will support Windows Vista (SP1, SP2), Windows 7 and Windows XP (SP3). To get maximum performance you obviously need a USB 3.0 capable motherboard or expansion card, but it is fully backwards compatible. All models have a 3 year warranty with free 24/7 support.

Kingston will be offering models 64GB, 128GB and 256GB in size and we are looking today at the 128GB model.

Key selling points:

  • Impressive write speed of up to 160MB/sec.
  • Read speed up to 195 MB/s
  • SuperSpeed Certified USB 3.0 – 10x faster than the transfer speed of USB 2.0
  • Shock-Proof
  • No moving parts means no mechanical failures
  • Portable
  • Mobile design, USB port powered; no external power supply required
  • Dimensions: 73.49mm x 118.60 mm x 12.00 mm : 2.89” x 4.67” x 0.47”

Become a Patron!

Check Also

Senior Intel Engineer Explains the Radical Shift in CPU Design

When Intel launched Lunar Lake (Core Ultra 200V) in 2024 we gave you the technical details and followed up with a review of the Asus Zenbook S 14 which has incredible battery life. In the following month we discussed Intel Arrow Lake (Core Ultra 200S) and how we considered it was unfit for review in a situation that was not resolved until February 2025. On the one hand we have Lunar Lake which we like, while on the other hand we have Arrow Lake which is troubled, yet both families of processors run on Lion Cove P-cores and Skymont E-cores and have a huge amount in common.

9 comments

  1. Holy Snit batman, thats a performance USB drive and a half ! I need to gets me a USB 3 controller 🙁

  2. Damn, thats another great product from Kingston. Excellent drive, toshiba controller is proven too, good choice.

  3. This is a great idea, only problem is, people in work etc, will more than likely be stuck on USB 2 machines for eons. so unless you are just using it for single machine or offline backups, its expensive !

  4. Well this is rather sexy innit? the usb 3 drives ive seen reviewed so far were lucky to hit 100MB so this is vastly superior. nice work Kingston.

  5. USB 2.0 really does need replacing. ive an old 500gb USB 2.0 drive and its facking painful to back up files. I normally do it overnight when im kipping. Look forward to one of these, but it will be a while as I just bought a motherboard a few months ago.

  6. Spend £15 on a USB 3.0 controller, best way to get usb 3 without forking out 150 quid again for a motherboard.

  7. Awesome, im buying a 64gb for my documents. any rough time for retail? mid dec? start? dec 2011? lol

  8. I think this is the first time ive really seen usb 3.0 external drives really shine with the performance. excellent performance results.

  9. massive gains over USB 2.0 very nice for an external drive

We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker.

Thank you for visiting KitGuru. Our news and reviews teams work hard to bring you the latest stories and finest, in-depth analysis.

We want to be as informative as possible – and to help our readers make the best buying decisions. The mechanism we use to run our business and pay some of the best journalists in the world, is advertising.

If you want to support KitGuru, then please add www.kitguru.net to your ad blocking whitelist or disable your adblocking software. It really makes a difference and allows us to continue creating the kind of content you really want to read.

It is important you know that we don’t run pop ups, pop unders, audio ads, code tracking ads or anything else that would interfere with the KitGuru experience. Adblockers can actually block some of our free content, such as galleries!