Kingston DataTraveller Ultimate 3.0 Review

Like any other flash drive review that I’ve done, there are two areas that I’m going to cover to round off this drive, starting off with the aesthetics. Keeping in line with current design trends, its great to see a drive that looks clean a crisp and breaks away from either the plastic moulded route or the painted metal finish. The brushed aluminium casing goes well with any notebook with a similar aesthetic look, such as the aforementioned MacBook Pro or even Dell’s XPS line of laptops like I have personally.  Whilst the drive may feel a little chunky, this is something we have become used to with larger capacity drives due to the extra circuitry  and components that are needed inside.

The other side of this drive is one that has really taken me by surprise, showing why Kingston are one of the best out there when its comes to memory and flash storage. The DataTraveler Ultimate is rated to have a read speed of 150MB/s and a write of 70MB/s under typical USB 3.0 conditions, however we consistently found in all of our benchmarks and even some that are not shown here that the drive is able to push right past these levels and through the 200MB/s barrier. This was confirmed not only in a benchmark scenario but also in a number of ‘real’ world tests by copying large sized files to and from the drive to get a better picture of sustained speeds – even these showed that the drive is more than capable of pushing through to the next level.

So if the drive is able of pushing past its rated speeds, it must have a healthy price tag to go with it? Well with the drive appearing on the shelves for around £64, the magical £1/GB target is right in sight and considering that we’ve found this particular drive to perform well past its rated speeds, the off the shelf value just got a whole heap better.

Bottom line, the DataTraveler Ultimate 3.0 G3 is one of the best non-HyperX drives that we’ve seen from Kingston to date, based not only on its clean & refined looks, but also its outstanding performance and excellent price point.