Kingston DataTraveler Mini 3.0 (16GB) Review – Great Performance In A Small Package

TECHNOLOGY X TEST BENCH AND PROTOCOL

A primary focus at Technology X is to relate our testing situations and equipment to that of the consumer. All of the components we use for testing and evaluation can be easily purchased at a relatively affordable price. The links provided below can assist in pricing, as well as availability for those of you who may find interest in our equipment.

SYSTEM COMPONENTS

BENCHMARK SOFTWARE

For analytical purposes, Technology X uses benchmark software that is easily accessible for the consumer. Furthermore, our equipment is only “fine tuned” using the SSD Optimization Guide, meaning that CPU clock speeds have not been adjusted. The software we will be using for today’s analysis is typical of many of our reviews and consists of ATTO Disk Benchmark, Crystal Disk Info, Crystal DiskMark, AS SSD, Anvil Storage Utilities and PCMark Vantage.

PIRIFORM SPECCY

Piriform Speccy is a great tool for checking the status and health of your computer system. It provides you with brief summary, or a detailed look, at your operating system, CPU, RAM, motherboard, graphics, storage, optical drives, audio, peripherals and network.

Speccy illustrates all of the pertinent information regarding the DataTraveler Mini 3.0. As we can see, the drive is formatted in the FAT32 file system, and has a total capacity of 14.7 GB. The serial number, partition information, and available space are also visible.

ATTO DISK BENCHMARK VER. 2.47

ATTO Disk Benchmark is a relatively easy-to-use benchmark tool, which happens to be the benchmark of choice for many manufacturers. ATTO uses compressible data rather than random data, which results in higher performance and thus, higher benchmark scores. In our testing, we have selected the transfer size to range from 0.5KB to 8192KB, and have set the total length of the test to be 256MB.

From the demonstration above, we can see that the DataTraveler Mini 3.0 reaches read speeds of 131 MB/s, and write speeds of 14 MB/s. Of course we must remember that this is with compressible data, lets take a closer at the drive when we use incompressible data.

CRYSTAL DISK BENCHMARK VER. 3.0.3 x64

Crystal Disk Benchmark is visually straightforward, and is used for measuring the speeds at which your storage device reads and writes in both compressible (oFill/1Fill) and random, mostly incompressible, data. Random data is more consistent with everyday use of a computer, such as transferring videos, pictures and music. We run the benchmark twice, using oFill data first, and then proceeding to test with random data. Since results typically return with nearly identical scores, we only include the results for random data samples.

Once we start throwing incompressible data at the DataTraveler Mini, the read speeds dropped slightly to 127.8 MB/s and the write speeds dropped to 8.9 MB/s. These are results are still impressive, considering we are only expected read speeds of 70 MB/s, as Kingston has noted.