Kingston DataTraveler Max - 256GB - USB 3.2 Gen 2 - Flash Drive Type-A - Up to 1,000MB/s Read, 900MB/s Write

I bought this USB-A drive to to be able to fully test USB 3.x cable bandwidth and needed to make sure that the drive was as fast as advertised. This is where it is important to know which ports on your PC are which and what the fastest ports are. I have a Gigabyte X570 motherboard with a variety of different USB ports, some on the rear I/O shield and some exposed on the front panel via internal USB3 headers and more with an aftermarket USB/card reader in a 5.25" drive bay but using USB3.2Gen1 header so limited to 5GB/s *ALL* of my front USB 3.0 ports are 3.2Gen1 meaning they max out at 5Gb/s or around 640MB/s - well short of the advertised max speed of this drive. In practice, even connected directly to the rear USB3.2Gen1 ports, the max bandwidth is less than the theoretical maximum and I got around 446MB/s sequential reads and 403MB/s sequential writes on the Gen1 ports. - see first screenshot. To fully get access to all the DataTraveller Max drive's speed potential you must use a USB3.2Gen2 or higher specified port. On my Gigabyte motherboard, these are coloured RED on the rear I/O shield and connected to that port, I got over 1020MB/s read and 879MB/s write speed. (see second screenshot) From early testing this is the fastest drive I have using USB and should allow me to test the cables I want to test. I agree with other reviewers that the slide mechanism is a bit faffy but disagree that a cap would have been preferable as I've seen caps get lost and the slide mechanism at least means it is permanently attached. For the price, this is definitely the fastest portable storage I own and I'm happy to recommend it.

I bought the Kingston DataTraveler Max to replace a SanDisk 3.2Gen 1 USB which had a very poor performance. I'm not sure whether this is typical of the SanDisk or it was just a poor example. The performance of the Kingston is excellent. Using ATTO benchmark 4.01.0f1 with the Kingston connected to an USB 3.1 Gen 2 port showed the following figures- Worst performance was for very small files with 11 MBytes/sec read and 11 MBytes/sec write Best performance for large files was 939 MBytes/sec for read and 880 Mbytes/sec write. The figures have been rounded to the nearest MByte/sec. For comparison the boot drive, a Samsung SSD 870 QVO 1Tb gave the following results- Worst performance was for very small files with 42 MBytes/sec read and 38 MBytes/sec write Best performance for large files was 538 MBytes/sec for read and 510 Mbytes/sec write. So for large files the Kingston is better than the main disk. Of course to get this performance you have to connect it to a high speed USB port. Connecting the Kingston to a standard USB 2 port gave the following results- Worst performance was for very small files with 2 MBytes/sec read and 3 MBytes/sec write Best performance for large files was 37 MBytes/sec for read and 37 Mbytes/sec write. This performance is still better than the SanDisk when it was connected to a high speed port! It is too early to comment on long term reliability but so far there have been no problems.

The fastest thumb drive I've ever owned. Great capacity for media.

Transfer speeds are good, though as usual with usb devices on windows, drop to about 40-50MB/s write speed once the write cache is full. capacity is as advertised (shows as 953 GB in windows, which is what i would expect) Reasonable build quality, though the slide mechanism is kind of janky-feeling, though easy to use. The sliding plastic cover is made of relatively thin plastic, and the lanyard/keyring slot isnt really reinforced in any way. Main body seems solid enough. Perfect for keeping in a bag or laptop case, rather than on your keys, especially considering its a bit big for a keyring. Doesn't get too hot when transferring large amounts of data, just slightly warm. Price seems reasonable for a good quality brand-named usb stick.

I have had a few Kingston USB drives in the past and to be truthful, was never very happy with the write speed, read speed was Ok, so this was a surprise, on benchmark testing using USB 3.2 Gen1 port , read 420Mb/sec. write 409Mb/sec. In real life testing, witting to the Kingston Data Traveler Max from USB 3.2 Gen1 port, video file of 5.59Gb returned a speed of 331Mb/sec. and took 18 seconds, in all fairness this is very good, Went onto copy some work files 9.86Gb (12680 files) I knew this would be a lot slower, jumped around a bit but under 6 minuets at around 29Mb/sec. average, My old stick was around 8Mb/sec. so lots faster for small files from what I am use to. Got 5 stars from me

Worked well initially, but crashed while transferring a few films from laptop to stick. Stick is now completely unusable and undetected by windows. I have maybe used this a dozen times and it is now a total brick. Utter rubbish. Amazon return procedure tells you to contact Kingston, which in itself is unacceptable. As it stands I've emailed Kingston to obtain a returns 'RMA' number. We'll see what happens...

I bought this for its capacity, but its speed is a great bonus. It took about 3 hours to load my >600GB music library using only USB 3.0 (and if I had 3.2 Gen 2 it might NOT have halved the time because clearly my old PC was the bottleneck). And this Kingston Flash Drive got to an almost imperceptible warmth. It works well and I'm very happy with it.

It works well, and pretty fast. On Windows 11 Core-i5, for copying media files of size more than 1GB, initially, it does a great job with 500mb/s but after a few seconds it drops and stays consistent at around 100mb/s. Overall performance is great. But the length of the USB seems very long and there could be the chance of it getting damaged due to that. For the price point, you won't find anything better than this.