Kingston Data Traveler 150 32 GB

Flash drives have become very essential. They are small, can hold oodles of data and quite a few of them now come with inbuilt security features, such as hardware encryption to keep your data safe. Their storage size has been increasing steadily with a doubling of space, virtually every few months.

The drive we are going to be reviewing today is from Kingston. It is the Data Traveler 150 and offers a whopping 32 GB of space. Let’s find out how it fares against the competition.

The Data traveler being a high capacity drive is fairly stubby and comes in a ghastly orange finish. The drive however does not weigh all that much and is quite easily pocketable with its dimensions of 77.9 mm x 22 mm x 12.05 mm (WxHxD). Unlike the preferred design nowadays, where the USB connector for the flash drive is stored as a slide mechanism, the DT150 sports the older design of having a cap. We checked out Kingston’s website, to check out the color availability in this range and found just one more - a nice rich dark red finish that looks a lot better than this one.

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Before we move on to our test section, one of the curious things any reader will notice is that the DT150 for such a high capacity drive was not “Readyboost ready” certified. The answer to this question lies in the performance benchmarks, which can be found on the next page.
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We tested the drive with Flash memory toolkit alongside the usual real world file tests of using 2 directories filled with 8 GB of data with small and large files. As you can see from the images below,the drive’s performance was very consistent across the board. It achieved read speeds of 30 MB/s and a rough figure of around 12 MB/s on its write speeds. These figures were echoed by our file tests except for the write test which dropped by 1 MB to an average of 11.2 MB/s.

To check out random performance, we used Crystal-Disk mark software to determine average read/ write speeds across various spectrums. This showed us why the drive is not Readyboost certified. One of rules of Readyboost is that:

“The device must be capable of 2.5 MB/s read speeds for 4 KB random reads spread uniformly across the entire device and 1.75 MB/s write speeds for 512 KB random writes spread uniformly across the device”

As you can see from the test results above the drive was well above the required mark for read speeds, but flopped miserably when it came to the write tests averaging a paltry 0.013 as an average.

The Kingston Data traveler 150 retails at Rs. 4,500. This makes it fairly expensive but given its portability and very good performance, we recommend it highly. Yes, you can buy a much higher capacity 80/120 GB 2.5-inch laptop drive for this cost but lose out on portability and size.