Peripheral Vision: Kingston HyperX Budget USB Drives, SteelSeries DeX Pad and Razer Chroma

The peripheral industry is awash with so many things today, coming in from Germany, it’s hard to keep up. So, instead of drip feeding them, here’s a round-up so far. Kingston have launched a new budget orientated USB flash drive under the HyperX FURY branding. With three sizes of 16GB, 32GB and 64GB. These are USB 3.0 spec’d, but at a fairly modest speed of 90MB/s read and 30MB/s write – not the fastest on the block, but should break people away from the rather appalling speeds of USB 2.0. Pricing isn’t available yet, but it shouldn’t be too bad.

Again in the Kingston park, a new color variant of the Cloud headset has been announced, in a rather spiffing white. Our very own Mr. Kane was certainly impressed with the original black version when put under review, to which I strongly suggest you go read.

SteelSeries released a new gaming mouse pad called the DeX – a low friction polymer pad with silicone base, and a 3D pattern for improved optical and laser tracking. Those poor mono-balled mice get no love any more. The edges have also been heat-sealed to prevent fraying over time. Prices are just shy of $40.

Razer will be introducing a new feature into its next wave of product updates, called Chroma, a full-spectrum wave of color to grace its peripherals. Full back-lit, multi-colored keyboards will soon be hitting retailers next year. Its top of the line BlackWidow Ultimate keyboard will really be showing it off through the use of individual key color back-lighting, with reactive activation (it can glow or change color when a key is pressed). Chroma will also get an SDK for devs to play with, even allowing peripherals to synchronize their colors (through Razer’s cloud service, of course).

In non-related peripheral news, OCZ is coming out with a new series of value-based SSDs, called ARC. Utilizing Toshiba’s A19nm NAND flash, and in-house Barefoot 3 M10 controller. Sporting 490MB/s sequential bandwidth and 80,000 4K random write IOPS, it’s on the upper end of SATA 6Gbps.

OCZ’s ARC SSDs will also come with a 3-year warranty, rated at 20GB per day worth of writes. Sizes available will be 120GB, 240GB, and 480GB capacities, with a sub-7mm form-factor, for low profile devices.