Kingston DataTraveler Ultimate 3.0 G2 32GB USB Flash Drive Review

PerformanceWhen performing any type of tests, generally not a lot is required. Just a suitable system with the correct interface for what you’re testing. With a USB flash drive, it simply requires a spare USB port and can be tested on a computer or laptop as long as it meets the standard. For us, we are testing the USB 3.0 interface for this drive, so therefore inserted it into a USB 3.0 capable port. This will allow us to see exactly how well this flash drive performs at its rated speeds.

For testing a USB flash drive, various software applications are available to use, and we sat down and decided which ones would be best to show the true performance. Whilst we could use every application under the sun, we decided to choose three software packages that are freely available to the mass market, allowing you to use as a comparison with your own USB flash drives.

First up was Atto, which with rated speeds of 80MB/sec read and 60MB/sec write speeds, we were bang on the money at 66MB/s write and 87MB/s read speeds when using a 1024 block. This shows that Kingston have not disappointed and the drive performs slightly over the rated marketing speeds.

CrystalDiskMark was next to see how this drive performed and once again, we saw very similar results to that of ATTO with 86MB/s read speed and 63MB/s write on the Sequential tests.

Last up to test the performance is HDTach which shows a burst speed of 88.3MB/s, whilst the average read fell just below that of the quoted speeds from Kingston at 78.1MB/s. Though this is a little bit lower, it’s still an impressive speed and had a consistent speed across various file sizes. The random access speed was also quite impressive with a low 0.8ms and 4% CPU utilization.