Back to School Review: Kingston 32GB DataTraveler Ultimate 3.0 G2

Reviewer Experience
We got this drive right before we took a two week trip abroad. This resulted in the drive being taken on multiple flights inside of a backpack among many other computer peripherals. This meant that the drive would be banged around and used in a normal fashion. We tasked this drive with being our back up media storage device and at another point our primary movie storage device. In both cases, the drive delivered unparalleled performance and reliability. There were no detection issues on any of the systems we plugged it into nor any corrupted data or files. We trusted this drive so much that we actually backed up all of our photos from the trip onto the 32GB drive (approximately 1,800 photos).

The simple fact is that the Kingston DataTraveler Ultimate 3.0 G2 filled many roles that USB drives simply didn’t have a place for in the household anymore. Having an ultra fast USB 3.0 drive meant that there was no longer a need to connect an external hard drive just to transfer movies and pictures to another computer. Granted, such things could be done over a wired network, but most people don’t have a gigabit wired network at home so having such a speedy drive could be invaluable as it is more convenient than most external drives and possibly even faster than many external drives.

Benchmarks
The drive was tested using the system with the following specs:

• Intel Core i7 2600K 3.4GHz Running @ 4.8GHz
• Intel DP67GB Extreme Series Featuring USB 3.0 and SATA 6G (B3 Stepping)
• 8GB Patriot Division 2 G2 DDR3-1600 (2x4GB)
• Dual NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti (SLI Enabled)
• 850W Seasonic X-850 80Plus Gold Modular PSU
• 120GB Intel 510 Series SSD
• 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black
• 8x Lite-ON Blu-ray Reader

We ran a few benchmarks, both synthetic and real world in order to gauge what kind of performance could be expected from the DataTraveler Ultimate 32GB G2.

SiSoft Sandra 2011 SP4
In SiSoft Sandra 2011 SP4, we ran a few tests to see how it compared to other USB drives out there and we got the following results.

If you look at our first test, you can see that the Kingston DT Ultimate G2 16GB actually slightly outperforms the 32GB model we are testing here in smaller file sizes (between 4K and 1MB), but once the files begin to get larger in size, the 32GB drive begins to pull away.

In our second test, we can see that the 16GB drive slightly edges out the 32GB drive, but considering how similar the drives are there’s a strong likelihood that this is simple within the margin of error and that some 32GB drives will be faster than 16GB and vice versa. Also, SiSandra gave the 32GB DT drive a better endurance factor than the 16GB model. This is likely because of the fact that the 32GB model is designed to have more longevity and the likely hood that all of the cells on the memory chip will be filled over time is also lower. As such, this is likely what improved the drive’s endurance factor.

AIDA64 v1.80
In AIDA64, we decided to run both read and write tests in order to determine whether or not Kingston’s speed estimates were overblown or conservatively underestimated. We tested the drive in both USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 ports in order to accurately measure the performance of both.

For the USB 3.0 read/write tests we saw an average write of 75MB/s with a maximum of 76.3MB/s and a read of 125.6MB/s with a maximum of 137.1MB/s. This significantly surpassed both of Kingston’s read and writes figures of 100MB/s and 70MB/s showing added value beyond what is expected. The average read access time was also 0.80ms which is also quite impressive.

For USB 2.0, the drive reported an average read of 33.MB/s which indicates that the drive also surpassed the 30MB/s figures which Kingston stated on the packaging and press releases.

CrystalDiskMark
We also decided to run CrystalDiskMark (i.e. CDM 3) while we were at it. Based on these figures, we can see that the Kingston DT Ultimate G2 32GB once again surpasses expectations by delivering 124.3/73.29 MB/s Read/Write.

This battery of tests just proves that the Kingston DT Ultimate G2 32GB is a sleeper USB drive with awesome performance and severely understated specs.


Real World Testing
For real world testing, we ran two different tests of media most commonly put on USB drives. Based on these findings, we created a pictures test and a video test that both determined the real world read/write speeds of the drives.

In the pictures test it took 200 photos at 16MP (1.27GB) the 13.2 seconds on average to read from the drive and write to the desktop. The same operation to write from the USB to the desktop took 25.9 seconds.

In the video test it took a 1080P video (1.46GB) on average 4.1 seconds to write to the desktop and 21.8 seconds to write to the USB drive from the desktop. This indicates a much faster read speed than what we had expected to see.