Review: Kingston DataTraveler Elite 3.0

The Kingston DataTraveler Elite is a lightweight, pop-top USB 3.0 flash drive offering claimed speeds of up to 70Mbyte/s read and 30Mbyte/s write. We tested the 16GB model, which costs $28, but it also comes in sizes up to 64GB. Note that this is a plain drive, offering no backup, encryption or other management software.

The design is nothing spectacular, but it’s certainly unusual – black, white and silver plastic, with the silver portion forming a pull down section that reveals the USB 3.0 connector. There’s also a keyring loop slot. I’m not a huge fan of pop-top USB flash drives: I find that, over time, the pop mechanism loosens and won’t stay either open or closed. In addition, with no lid, the USB connector can become filled with lint, fluff and the kind of detritus that floats around in the average backpack. Having said that, Kingston offers a five-year warranty on this model, which suggests that the internals are durable, even if the USB connector is not resistant to grotty bags.

We tested a range of file types with the Kingston DataTraveler Elite to evaluate its performance. For highly compressed music files, we recorded a speed around 23MByte/s read, and 18MByte/s write. For small files, read speed performance was similar –23MByte/s. However, for small files, write speed slowed down to 3MByte/s. We did manage to clock 65MByte/s read speeds for standard uncompressed large files and movies, and for these file types we also recorded 26MByte/s write speed.

These speeds are very solid for a mid-priced drive such as the Elite, and if your needs are mostly for standard file copies, you should get the claimed speeds. Given the warranty, and $28 price, this is a handy helper.