How can my Kingston DataTraveler flash drive connect at USB 3.0?

ship69 · 31 Jul 2023

Hello

I have a Kingston DataTraveler 100 G3 flash drive (i.e. 128GB memory stick)
It is supposed to be a "USB 3.0" drive, but I am only getting very slow copying speeds (i.e. about 500 KB/s to 6 MB/s)

I am connecting it to the "USB 3.0" drive on my Samsung Series 7 ULTRA (model: NP740U3E-S04UK).
The port is located to the left of the keyboard and has the USB 3.0 icon on it.

How can my Kingston DataTraveler flash drive connect at USB 3.0?-delme_usb_3b.png

To be fair, the drive is encrypted using BitLocker, but surely we can get faster than this!

With thanks

J

LesFerch · 31 Jul 2023

Yeah, those speeds are pretty sad. It would be helpful to get the numbers without encryption. That flash drive appears to max out at about 50MB/s write and 200MB/s read. So, it's not great, but it doesn't appear to be the bottleneck. Performance will drop off dramatically with a lot of tiny files versus a few large files, so, that's something to factor into any comparisons.

Do you have a similar non-encrypted USB drive to compare to using the same file set?

Megahertz · 31 Jul 2023

Where did you buy it? Hopefully not on eBay.
There are a lot of fake drives on the market. They are very good clones of the original but they are fake.
Fake on capacity and / or speed.
Many years ago I bought a Kingston 64G that was in fact only 4G despite Windows properties shows as 64G

Run h2testw tester on it

Just ran a small test on my Kingston DT50 (64G)
Writing speed: 2.93 MByte/s
Reading speed: 88.7 MByte/s

The bottle neck isn't the USB communication (USB 3,x) but the flash memory.

If you want a fast USB drive, buy a 2.5" SATA SSD and a USB case (Up to 600 MB/s)
Even faster is a M.2 NVMe and a M.2 USB case (Up to 1200 MB/s)

Remember that Flash drive speeds are in MB/s and USB speeds are Mb/s (a factor of 8)

RickC · 31 Jul 2023

Check out the Nirsoft USB speed tests for comparison.

You'll need to know the exact VID/PID combo (which USBDeview should show or see Identify a VID PID for a USB Device) so you can compare directly.

There's only one submitted test result for what appears to be the Kingston DataTraveler 100 G3 128GB:

You'll see its READ speed is 30.80MB/sec... nowhere near Kingston's claim of 130MB/sec on its datasheet.

Hope this helps...

Helmut · 31 Jul 2023

Those are the expected speeds for low cost USB 3 flash drives. The limiting factor is the speed of the flash memory chips.

I have a number of DT100 G3 32 GB drives and using the H2testw test files have Write speeds of around 25 MB/s and read speeds around 40 MB/s.
The Data sheet says 10 MB/s Write, 40 MB/s Read thus they meet the spec sheet at the time (2014).

That is an optimistic test, real world with varying sized files it is somewhat less.

Same sort of result with low cost SanDisk USB 3 flash drives.

That is how it is with cheap branded flash drives.