Kingston 4GB DataTraveler 101 USB Flash Drive

Benchmarking the DT 101

We tested the Kingston DataTraveler 101 4GB Flash drive on an ASUS S62J ‘white box’ notebook with a Core Duo T2500 @ 2.0GHz. The Removable Storage test found in SiSoftware Sandra Lite XII was used to get read and write performance numbers of this USB flash drive and several others that we have tested over time on the same notebook. It should be noted that the DataTraveler 101 has a green LED activity light.

The DataTraveler 101 had impressive read speeds in the 256kb file test as it placed third among the 12 Flash drives. The write performance wasn’t anything impressive, though, as it was just a smudge under 4MB/sec. Let’s see what happens to performance levels when a 64MB files test is run.

On the 64MB file test the Kingston DataTraveler 101 does a little better and was at 7.5MB/sec write speeds and 22.4MB/sec when it came to read performance. The write speed was observed as right in the middle of the pack compared to the twelve other USB 2.0 Flash drives that we have tested on this laptop. The read performance was a little better at 22.4MB/sec, but not nearly enough to compete with many of the other drives in the chart.

To confirm the Removable Storage Benchmark that was used in SiSoftware Sandra we ran the Flash Memory Toolkit v1.20 file benchmark. This benchmark tests 1-5MB file sizes and found that in the 5MB file size test, the Kingston DataTraveler 101 had a write speed of 6.8MB/s and a read speed of 21.8MB/s.