Kingston DataTraveler Ultimate 3.0 Gen 2 32GB Flash Drive Review

Free Capacity and Final Thoughts

Capacity

When it comes to storage capacity, the Kingston DataTraveler Ultimate 3.0 Gen 2 32GB Flash drive has a free capacity of 29.8GB as shown above. Kingston states that some of the listed capacity is used for formatting and other functions and thus is not available for data storage.

Final Thoughts and Conclusions

When we looked at the original Kingston DataTraveler Ultimate 3.0 Flash drive series we feel in love with the super fast drives and we couldn’t find any flaws in the device. It has been nearly 11 months since these drives were released and we are happy to see that Kingston has updated the ‘guts’ of this series and made them just slightly faster to stay competitive with other brands on the market. One of the other things that is great for consumers is that NAND Flash prices have continued to decrease, so not only are the Gen 2 drives faster, but they also cost less than their original counter parts! With SuperSpeed USB 3.0 being a standard features on pretty much every motherboard sold today the consumer base for these products has grown substantially and that too has helped bring the pricing down a bit.

The performance of the Kingston DataTraveler Ultimate 3.0 Flash Gen 2 32GB drive was excellent and in nearly all of the benchmarks we were able to exceed the factory peak ratings of 100MB/s read and 70MB/s write. In CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1, for example, we saw 129MB/s in the sequential read test and 82MB/s in the sequential read test. These are very impressive numbers and easily blow away USB 2.0 devices. Being able to transfer a 1GB file in right around 15 seconds is pretty amazing and if you have to move large amounts of data a USB 3.0 Flash drive is a must!

When it comes to the pricing of the Kingston DataTraveler Ultimate 3.0 Gen 2 Flash drive series they are available in 16GB (DTU30G2/16GB), 32GB (DTU30G2/32GB) and 64GB (DTU30G2/64GB) drive capacities. The 16GB model has a street cost of $50.36, the 32GB is $80.74 and the 64GB model is being sold for $145.30. Back in September 2010 the pricing on the original series was $65, $100 and $200 respectively. As you can see prices have dropped roughly 20% and the Gen 2 drives are significantly faster than the old drives! All capacities of the DataTraveler Ultimate 3.0 Gen 2 Flash drive come backed with a 5-year warranty in the event that something goes wrong and it needs to be replaced.

Legit Bottom Line: If you want a fast and portable USB 3.0 Flash Drive the Kingston DataTraveler Ultimate 3.0 Gen 2 Flash drive series won’t disappoint!