Kingston U3 DataTraveler Flash Drive Review

Performance

To benchmark the Kingston U3 DataTraveler, we grabbed our OCZ 512MB and Generic 256MB flash drives and ran SiSoft Sandra 2003.SR3 to find the Read and Wrige speeds for each drive. Here we should see the benefit of high-speed USB2.0 and the difference between Kingston’s U3 DataTraveler against a vanilla high-speed flash drive.

When comparing the read bandwidth between the three flash drives, it is apearant that there is some sort of performance hit on the Kingston U3 DataTraveler. This may be due to the way the U3’s partitions are implemented or OCZ is using lower latency flash memory. It is clear that the Generic flash drive’s performance is no match for the Kinston or OCZ high-speed flash drives. Let’s take a look at the write scores.

This time around, the Kingston U3 DataTraveler shows that for 2MB or smaller files, it can write faster than the OCZ flash drive, but OCZ performs better when writing larger files.

Overall, the performance of the Kinston U3 DataTraveler meets or exceeds the advertised performance. The package for the U3 DataTraveler indicate a max read speed of 6 MB/sec and a max write speed of 3 MB/sec. From our testing we show that the U3 DataTraveler greatly exceeds its advertised read performance for 256 kB files or larger!