So far this is the king of the inexpensive flash drives I've found. Advantages include:
- Unlike most vendor claims, the actual sequential read times exceed the claims. Kingston claims "200MB/s" but the read times are "conservative" and even exceed that if the read operations are large enough. Only when you start getting below 64K reads or so do the numbers drop below that, but people tend to use large files (like images, which are usually at least 1MB for reasonable photos and scans).
- Of course the write times are never going to match the read times, because even in ideal circumstances where flash blocks are fully re-written, there's still this "erase entire block" followed by writing to each page in the block. So flash is inherently limited on writes, but these are respectable when writing large contiguous files.
- As you can see in the second screenshot, random access is still amazingly good for 256K reads and larger, but it starts dropping off dramatically after that. Trying to write many small blocks in random locations is always going to be absolutely abysmal because when you write less than a full block, the USB stick has to erase an entire block, copy the pages you are not changing, then write your tiny number of pages. But this doesn't matter too much since people don't normally use these drives for highly random small write operations (as might occur on an OS system drive where the OS wants to write to lots of log files and such all the time).
- The USB info returns clean sane values. Unlike the amazing "ProductCode" drive from that iconic household name brand "VendorC", the USB vendor and product strings in this drive contain worthwhile terms for correctly identifying what device you just inserted. The numeric product and vendor codes also correctly identify the actual vendor brand printed on the device as well as the product name.
- The drives are also made of metal and are not going to get smashed easily by books and such being set on them.
- The metal construction also helps dissipate heat, and these drives don't heat up like crazy unlike all of the little mini-drives that I've seen. While they might be 3 times as long as those, they are as thin or thinner than most of them.
These are perfect for situations where you need to hand out some drives, but don't need more than 32GB on each drive. They can also be had for as little as $5.50 or so from some sellers. If you have to pay more than that then you will be better off to get a decent brand of 64GB.
So if you want some small and inexpensive drives for whatever reason, like handing out bootable "live" OS installs, or just a lot of photo/video/music files, but don't want to spend much money, these things look like you're best bet. At least I haven't found anything better yet for this price.
The amount of crappy drives out there, even from recognizable brands, is really a huge shame. But these are great and I'm not surprised that Kingston has no problem claiming credit for them.
| Connectivity Technology | USB |
|---|---|
| Color | Silver |
| Model Name | DTKN/32GB |
| Product Dimensions | 0.19"D x 0.5"W x 1.54"H |
| Flash Memory Type | USB |
| RAM | 32 GB |
