USB 3.0 Flash Drives exist, Kingston Technology has them…

Photo of the Kingston Data Traveler USB 3.0
Kingston USB DTU 3.0 Flash Drive

It was a few weeks ago that TechtalkRadio recieved some USB 3.0 adapters from our friends at TrendNet so we could test out and experience the glory that would be USB 3.0. Seriously, the idea of transfering large files to external drives,  flash drives or even broadcasting or playing back video in HD is possible with the sysem specs of USB 3.0

Andy Taylor of TechtalkRadio made a few calls and reached out to manufacturers for external USB devices and connected with Kingston Technologies. The Fountain Valley California sent us a DataTraveler Ultimate 3.0.

To give you an idea why we were so excited with the concept, The specification for USB 3.0 with the data traverller from Kingston allows for data transfers as fast as 80 MB per second when being read from the drive, and up to 60 MB per second when being written to the drive…up to ten times the rate as USB 2.0 (which is 30 MB per second to read from, and 30 MB per second to write to, those types of drives).

To transfer a 265,441 MB file via a USB 3.0 connection to the drive took about 10 seconds.  Tranferring the same file via USB 2.0 to the drive took about 15 seconds. On the Kingston website it was noted  “During internal testing, a 1 hour 44 minute movie (3.9GB) was written to the drive in 1 minute 13 seconds. Similarly, a 2 hour 23 minute DVD (4.4GB) transferred to the drive at a fast 1 minute 23 seconds.”

I took the Beefy USB DataTraveler out of the packaging and began with the idea of formatting the FAT32 device to NTFS. I then tried a write of a  4.05 GB file:  it needed about two minutes via USB 3.0.  At USB 2.0 it took nearly 4 minutes to complete. Happy indeed was I and I could imagine how time saving this would be moving large amounts of small files.  The product we looked at was the 32GB Model.

The DataTraveler Ultimate 3.0 is available in 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB capacities.  For use with some USB 2.0 ports, a Y-cable…that has two Type A plugs, and one Type A receptacle…is included.

Slick