Welcome to portable Solid State Society.

Kingston’s labs whipped out something new for gamers once again as their HyperX brand unveils the SAVAGE EXO, their newest Portable External Solid State Drive marketed mainly as a storage expansion solution for PS4 and Xbox One owners.

Having demoed in front of gaming media during the eve of the Electronic Sports and Gaming Summit 2018, we took the SAVAGE EXO through further tests, running benchmarks and utilizing it’s capabilities as a workstation tool with a ton of reading and writing (obviously). So how did the SAVAGE EXO fare?

Aesthetic and Compatibility

Compact and lightweight, the HyperX SAVAGE EXO measures roughly as your standard NVMe SSD and easily fits in your pocket leading to easy storage. The device comes with 2 USB-based connectors, one that connects to Type C ports and one that connects to Type A 3.0 ports, which can be used for both Mac and Windows respectively, although it did not offer any connectivity option to Lightning type connectors which are becoming more of a norm in the PC and Notebook field.

The HyperX SAVAGE EXO together with its USB connectors.

The package inclusions are pretty straightforward, with only the SAVAGE EXO and its 2 connectors included, as well as few manuals and your standard warranty cards, and no extra installers, not like you need it since the device is purely plug and play.

Performance

Our hands-one experience so far with the HyperX SAVAGE EXO delivers very favorable results when transferring data and well as being utilized for editing media such as photos and videos with virtually zero lag-time when importing clips and photo resources and exporting rendered files. However to get better accuracy on results we did run benchmarks on the device using CrystalDiskMark  using 1GB, 8GB and 32GB size variations at a base test count of 5 using an Acer Aspire 3 notebook which has a USB 3.0 port, which yielded the following results:

Editor’s note: as we have already been using the SAVAGE EXO, we had to move 40GB worth of files (which are a combination of media files and software, and reformat the device to return it as close as possible to its out of box state

Sequential Read/Writes hit an average of 408.8 MB/s / 380.8 MB/s with some obvious minor performance fluctuation when handling bigger files. The same performance decline is also visible on 4K data tests, although write speeds does speed up when writing bigger files.

Aside from CrystalDiskMark we also ran a few tests using AS SSD although we have been limited to using 1GB and 5GB test sizes.

Note that the AS SSD is tailored more towards Solid State Drives (hence the name) and uses compressed files when running its tests.

Performance IRL

As stated in our quick notes above, we previously had stored 40GB worth of files in the HyperX SAVAGE EXO which we transferred to our test workstation notebook and back to the SAVAGE EXO to try and manually gauge data transfer times. For 40GB worth or uncompressed files, composed of video game software and as well as videos, audios and photos, we were able to hit an estimated transfer time of about 10 minutes and 23 seconds which is roughly equivalent to about 64 MB/s of transfer rate. Of course we have to factor in that the Acer Aspire 3 uses its own mobile 1 TB hard drive which could attribute to this difference in performance compare to the benchmarks above.

Our verdict?

With an estimated starting price of PHP 7,000 in the local market, the Hyper SAVAGE EXO might be up to some tough competition with a variety of external SSD choices available in the market today that sit at the same price point. However, as it delivers on the performance, and not to mention its tailored compatibility with console devices, it could very well sit on top of the list of choices when looking for more better options than to delete your copies of Persona 5 and Amazing Spiderman on your PS4 just to fit in a copy of Red Dead Redemption on your console’s internal storage.