Kingston HyperX SAVAGE EXO SSD (SHSX100/960G) Portable Solid-State Drive, grey

Good price, good performance, silent and effective.

Great product for using when commuting between home and the office. No installation programs needed, great plug and play device for Windows 10.

The future is here and it’s... pretty fast! Modelled like a flat, futuristic sports car, this SSD isn’t just lightweight and has NO MOVING OR BREAKABLE PARTS (dream come true), but it’s also formatted to ExFAT already, meaning it works out of the box on Windows or Mac with no compatibility issues, no reformatting, and no installers to run!Long have I been waiting for the day that SSD hard drives with large enough space would come out that I could use them for backing up video on the go... and here we are! Alas, now the day has come, USB3 has been succeeded with even faster USB-C ports and as my laptop doesn’t have these connections, I can’t test this to it’s true potential. Thankfully as USB-C isn’t yet the standard, both a USB3 cable and a USB-C cable are provided, so it’s as backwards compatible as you can get.That said, dragging large files to it is still lightening fast on USB3, although surprisingly, although there’s no moving disk inside, it feels like there’s a short moment of buffering files up to their top speed when transferring over USB3. To be honest, SSD technology is as new to me as the next consumer, so I’m still embracing its quirks, but a 6GB HD video transferred in around a minute (before buffering the transfer it estimated three), I can’t complain at all.When I told someone I got a 480GB SSD they asked why I didn’t just get a USB stick. I see their point, but for use in gaming, which this SSD is targeted at, do you see your console with a USB stick poking out, or a slick pebble you can hide round the side with a cable?Whatever your use, games or backup, I’ll take a cabled drive for that reason, particularly given the amount of times I’ve left USB keys behind because after presentations I can’t see them plugged in round the back of the client’s computer...

This drive is unbelievably, blisteringly quick. I did a full back-up of all my files and was getting between 360mb/400mb on both read and write speeds, although it is measured as faster by the manufacturer; however, that’s not bad for real world. Designed to be used by gamers - why should they have all the fun?, this will work equally as well with anything you need to keep a copy of. Very compact in size, hardly made a dent in my laptop bag, and it’s incredibly lightweight: weighing in at 59g. It comes with two cables: USB3.1 to normal USB and USB3C to USB3C, so you have connectivity to a range of devices. 480Gb is a huge amount of storage to be packed into such a small, very Star Trek looking package. Another good thing with SSD storage (apart from the generally quick read and write speeds) is they will take some general physical abuse, you can’t really damage them like you could the old needle hard drives, simply by shaking them. So far I’m impressed with this SSD, it does everything it’s supposed to and looks great to boot.

So many claims that a product will speed up loading times, and so many times disappointed by the results. Not this time however. Keen to dispute the claims, I formatted this as extended storage in my PS4Pro, and copied a I/O intensive game (Gran Turismo Sport), and did some timings. Game launch was indeed reduced. Running from standard internal Sony HDD: 35 seconds to launch, after copying, running from this 27 seconds. Similar reduction % in load times were seen throughout the game.Essentially, the claims held up, this is very fast storage, and it's competitively priced, and a serious contender for extending your consoles storage rather than replacing.It obviously works on Xbox One, PC, Mac, The device itself has a USB-C connection, and the kit and comes with a handy USB-C to USB-C lead (which can double as a handy data transfer, charging cable) and a regular old-skool USB-A to USB-CAll in all, impressed with this...EDIT: Update 30/03/2020 Had some serious performance issues with this drive on my PS4, things really ground to a halt. After a bit of digging, I found I needed a firmware update on the drive. I used Kingston® SSD Manager software to update the firmware using my PC, and then performance was back to what it should be. I hope this helps others (please like my review if so).

Opening up this HyperX Savage EXO 480GB External Solid State External drive (Daft name) I'm reminded of my very first Sony Data Vault 256Mb that I bought in 2003 and cost me £100 ... in real terms that is more expensive than the HyperX which has nearly 2,000 x the capacity.It really is incredible how light and slim this device is, and is perfect for taking data (whatever you chose) out and about with you and being solid state, should be robust.It linked instantly with my iMac giving an available capacity of 480.09.Obviously it can be used to store and retrieve any kind of data, I guess it could even be used for backup and retrieval, but perhaps that would be missing the point of having a lightening fast drive.We will use it for pretty hefty design specs which can take an age to load ... and I may even load a few films and music when I am away from home.I'm not techie enough to comment about access and transfer speeds or even how to measure them, all I know is that it is bloomin rapid.Supplied with USB C to C and C to A cables ... A good buy I think.