For anyone who has backed campaigns on Kickstarter, you probably know that they’re sometimes a crapshoot. Back in 2019, I backed two portable SSD projects: HyperDisk and WarpDrive. Both were expected to deliver in early 2020, but a combination of a suddenly volatile SSD market and the COVID pandemic caused them both to sort of evaporate – vaporware, if you will. Many started hammering both as scams, demanding refunds – a fairly reasonable response given that many campaigns go that route.
WarpDrive may very well have been a scam. The creators haven’t posted an update since January 2020. HyperDisk has had updates and, much to my surprise, I actually received mine today. So, of course, I set to benchmark it against their purported 1000MB/s claims.
It does actually meet those speeds using the supplied USB-C to USB-C cable to the Thunderbolt 3 port on my laptop. Internally, the enclosure is a 3.1 Gen 2 interface with an M.2 NVMe SSD. The cost during the campaign was US$139, and for a comparable (what appears to be a 2242 form-factor stick) SSD with an enclosure, it came out to be pretty much a wash in February 2021 prices, though for the time it was a pretty decent deal. I haven’t opened it up to look, but I’m presuming a 2242 based on the size. I’m also not sure the branding on the stick itself.
The part number, HYPCNV001T doesn’t bring up anything in Google.
We’ll see how it holds up over time, but for now I’m not terribly displeased. I’ve come to expect Kickstarter campaigns to deliver long after their estimates. I’ve backed 128 projects to date, though many have been just a $1 backing as a show of support (if a lot of folk gave even a dollar to many “good” projects, more would end up with the necessary funding – worth thinking on). Of the ones with a deliverable product that I’ve backed at a tier to get said product, ~80% of them have gone beyond their time tables, and of those, half or so by quite a ways… often a year or more.