Kingston Data Traveler 150 Flash Drive Review

Design & Usability

USB Duplicators by Nexcopy The Kingston Datatraveler 150 (DT150) comes in two flavors, a 32GB sized blazing orange and a 64GB fiery red and black model. Today's review will cover the more readily available 32GB Datatraveler which boasts one of the sleekest flash drive designs to be featured on our site in more recent times. Sized to fit your pocket and wallet at the same time but without sacrificing performance seems to be the marketing-hype surrounding Kingston's launch. While not as miniature as the Corsair Voyager Mini, it's size is still easily portable and it's looks really make you appreciate the time someone has taken to design this drive. Built in a sleek and narrow plastic housing with only one dim blue LED for activity indication, the surface of the drive, and indeed it's main attraction really, sports a beautiful designer pattern.

Among other features this drive also has black plastic ridges along both sides to give users an easy surface to grip for the removal from USB ports. A key-chain ring is included in the packaging to be fitted after purchase and should help secure the unit easily to any keys you might have floating around. Thankfully the cap also secures itself to the rear of the flash drive quite securely but I would hazard to guess that after a few thousand removals of the cap to the rear, the cap will eventually be lost. Unfortunately Kingston does not seem to offer any easy cap replacement service compared to what Corsair does for it's product-line nor does the cap have any other fail-safe mechanism to prevent its loss.

The Data Traveler 150 (32GB shown here) is by no means small physically, but the capacity it offers is impressive.

Here shows the cap secured itself to the rear of the Data Traveler 150.

The narrow design means the drive should easily fit into nearly any USB Type A port without having to move adjacent USB connectors aside. This is likely the reason why Kingston chose not to include any USB extension cable.

The Data Traveler 32GB drive comes pre-formatted with a FAT32 file table with a generous total user accessible space of 32,287,801,344 bytes (30.0GB). The great thing about today's flash drive sizes of 32GB and more, you run a reduced risk of exhausting the manufacturer implemented wear-leveling technologies and thus automatically drastically increase the average life expectancy of any MLC flash based solution. 32GB of flash drive storage will easily last you past it's anticipated effective life-time. For readers with a Microsoft Windows XP/Vista operating system and looking to store files larger than 4GB on the drive we highly recommend formatting this drive immediately upon receipt to an NTFS file table to increase the performance and capability of the drive. Users who anticipate moving the DT150 frequently between OS X, Linux and Windows based may want to retain the original FAT32 file table on the drive for maximum compatibility between operating systems.

USB flash drives have come a long way from their original bulky USB based incarnation with no consideration for ease-of-use or value added software. While some manufacturers bundle their drives with additional software to integrate features ranging from a portable desktop (Migo) or portable application launcher (U3, Ceedo), Kingston's latest Data Traveler comes no additional bloatware. For those readers looking for Migo or U3 based functionality from flash drive we would suggest Kingston or any other USB flash drive manufacturer's U3 specific USB flash drive offerings or alternatively, the freeware alternatives.

Data Traveler Durability & Compatibility
The drive is built fairly rugged, and while it may not sport Corsair's signature rubberized case, the plastic build of the Data Traveler is very solid. We tried twisting the drive in a couple of directions with our bare hands but it withstood all of our efforts. The only thing this drive would have to fear is a ten-ton truck crushing it beneath its tires and hopefully people don't have too many of those around to prove this theory correct. The case is also fairly resilient against scratches as we managed to drop it a few times during transportation from home to the office but even Kingston's own logo held up against and damage.

To verify the drives adherence to the USB 2.0 specification we then proceeded using the USB-IF's USB Command Verifier utility (USBCV) Chapter 9 and Mass Storage Class tests. This test suite is made publicly available and allows you to test the USB devices acceptance of the USB protocol and ensure no future compatibility issues may occur because the manufacturer used an out of specification value in his USB design implementation. Kingston's Data Traveler 150 passed both tests with flying colors and should work out of the box with any host computer that fully supports the Mass Storage Class for USB devices.

In addition to the USBCV test suite we also conducted basic functional testing on both Apple Mac OS X 10.5.4 / Ubuntu 8.04 to verify Kingston's compatibility claims and experienced no issues.

Data Traveler Performance
All benchmarking was performed on an Intel-based USB host controller featuring an ICH8 South Bridge and the 32GB flash drive directly connected to the host computer. The operating used was Microsoft's Windows Vista 64-bit including Service Pack 1.

For our synthetic benchmark scores we used SiSoft Sandra 2009 software suite and ran the Removable Storage benchmark to gauge performance across different file sizes copying to and from the drive. We also included some previous benchmark scores for drives from Corsair Voyager Mini 8GB and Voyager 8GB) for comparative reasons.

The Kingston Data Traveler 32GB flash drive managed to maintain a respectable lead or similar performance to both Corsair Voyager models with any file transfers SiSoft Sandra could throw at it. The drive peaked at 29.87MB/s for read scores on 256MB file sizes and maintained a healthy minimum read performance of 24.35MB/s for any files sized 256kB or bigger. The biggest drop in performance came from the use of files sized 32kB or smaller which is where the Corsair Voyager 8GB formatted with an NTFS file system manages to trounce the Kingston DT150.

Write scores for the Data Traveler 150 showed much more promise compared to Kingston's competition. In all benchmarks except anything smaller than 256kB the Kingston drive exceeded our expectations with a maximum write performance of 13.87MB/s. Smaller sized files seemed to suffer similarly from bad performance on all drives but most users would really be using the gargantuan 32GB sized drive for larger purposes rather than copying small 512byte text files.

For our real-world benchmark scores we used Microsoft's Robocopy tool and copied a 640MB ISO file from and to the flash drive. Read scores showed similar results to the SiSoft Sandra performance with a maximum of 30.31MB/s copying from the flash drive to the local hard drive. The write performance lingered at 12.87MB/s, which is reasonable considering the use of MLC NAND.

Readyboost's minimum requirements state that the flash drive must support 2.5MB/s for 4K random access reads and 1.5MB/sec for 512K random writes. We attempted to enable Readyboost and force Vista to retest the device's Readyboost capability, unfortunately the Data Traveler 32GB flash drive was incapable of supporting Microsoft's Windows Vista enhancement.

Given that the Kingston Datatraveler is built using the cheaper and more readily available MLC NAND flash, the write performance especially during small file operations does suffer compared to the more expensive and barely available SLC NAND flash. Ultimately the use of MLC NAND flash will, however, at the very least cost you twice as much time writing to the flash drive compared to an SLC NAND flash based drive, but you'll have some spare change to spend on other tech gadgets.

Recap
The Kingston family's latest USB flash drive addition comes to the market with great read and average write performance, great for those of you looking for vast amounts of easily portable storage space without necessarily breaking the bank either. Built with a solid case and a great look I applaud Kingston's continuous ability to offer some of the finest and most robust flash drive designs on the market and thus the Data Traveler 150 naturally comes highly recommended.