Once USB drives were everywhere, they weren't particularly fast nor large but they were more portable that HDDs and much more durable.  With the arrival of SSDs, flash storage moved from slower thumb drives to SATA which has now become the bottleneck for speed as the drives themselves can actually exceed the transfer capabilities of SATA.  That leaves the USB drive out in the cold, with prices matching or even exceeding lower end SSDs and a form factor only slightly more portable than an SSD in an enclosure.

Kingston's Digital HyperX Savage 128GB USB drive is $86 and Kitguru saw sequential reads topping 400MB/s and writes around 200MB/s which comes close to the limits of the USB 3 connection it uses.  The question is, does the smaller size and admittedly attractive packaging draw you to choose this over a low cost SSD and enclosure?

"Kingston has earned a reputation with its HyperX brand over the last few years. Today, we are taking a look at the HyperX Savage 128GB USB drive, which supports first-generation USB 3.1 technology and promises ‘blazing fast’ read and write speeds. How does it hold up? Let’s find out!"

Here are some more Storage reviews from around the web:

Storage MyDigitalSSD BP5e Bullet Proof 5 Eco 240GB SSD @ eTeknix