Kingston DataTraveler Max 256GB USB-C Flash Drive with USB 3.2 Gen 2 Performance, Black

Great "little" stick drive. It's actually, a few inches long, but it is very fast, installed with no issue, and has a lot of space on it. My wife has a phone with no micro slot and only 128GB of total drive space, so videos and pictures at high resolution fill it quickly. This stick allows you to clear out your phone's photos and vids in a matter of minutes, but still have them for editing and use later.

My drive definitely gets the advertised speeds on USB 3.2 GEN 2 port. On a 3.2 Gen 1 port, I get about half the advertised speeds. Still very fast for a small flash drive. Also works well on my phone. This flash drive does get fairly hot, but that's to be expected because of it's fast transfer speeds. I bought this product for around $38. At that price, it was only about $8-10 dollars more when compared to other big name brand 256gb USB C flash drives, but you get much faster speeds. At $38 dollars, I think this drive is fantastic, but I don't think I would buy this product again unless it came back around or below $38. Minor complaints: I wish the case was made out of metal rather than plastic. For a drive that's supposed to retail for $63 dollars, you would think it would have a more premium finish. A metal case would also help transfer heat more effectively than plastic. Also, the design of the case could be better. When the USB plug is sheathed, the plug is still exposed on the back. They really should have designed it so the plug is fully covered when sheathed. Lastly, I wish the USB plug was extended slightly so I could use this flash drive with certain phone cases. Most phone cases will not allow you to fully insert this drive. You will either need to remove your the case or buy a new one that has enough room to insert the drive. (I wouldn't really consider this a design flaw or proper complaint but it would be a nice QOL improvement).

It's fast alright, and bit (one terabyte/1TB model). It's a VERY LONG USB drive though, and the same width and height as a USB-A drive. It puts a lot of leverage on that little USB-C plug, so if you bump it it feels like it'll bend or break. The plastic is cheap feeling and the fit around the internal board isn't very tight so it flops around a bit. Overall feels WAY cheaper than it is. I probably wouldn't ever buy this brand again, because I want things to last when I spend good money on them. This thing is not long for the world, especially if you have a thin laptop and it spends a lot of time millimeters from the surface of your desk... one wring set-down or pick-up and it feels like it'll be toast.

I capture a lot of 4K/60fps footage of my daughters' soccer matches, and at 24GB per game, and sometimes multiple games per day, my 128GB iPhone storage can't always handle the capacity needs! I needed a way to quickly and easily transfer these large 12GB (per half) files off the local storage, to enable me to record later games. I started initially with a USB-C to SD card adapter, and a high-quality SD card, but this was slooooowww. At least 20 mins to copy the 12GB file. This USB-C flash drive, formatted in ExFAT, copied the same size file in SECONDS. It was like night and day difference, and for the price, 256GB capacity is perfect for me - it was a no brainer. The only challenge I had, was I need to remove my phone case to get a good connection, but I'll take that - it's 100% worth it. Highly recommended!

The drive packaging would prevent any potential damage during shipping yet was easy to access. The drive arrived on-time as promised. I was able to install an emergency copy of Windows 10 Pro and Office 2019 for when my PC SSD will fail. The install took about same time it took to install on the SSD! This new drive replaces an old drive that has become too small with all the updates to Windows! Incredible read and write speeds with windows and other apps installed for emergencies running just as fast as my SSD on the PC! The drive has not one time overheated as experienced with other drives. I use the drive once per month to produce an image of my PC dormant drive. I have successfully recovered the PC drive after at least two failures using this procedure with the old drive (along with using daily sync-toy backups of work/mail/etc. files)! Both the image and daily backups are contained on another external 3TB drive. The old drive never ran this fast. Highly recommend this drive.

Decided to buy a couple of brand new USB drives that were full-on USB3.2 devices to get the fastest speeds on my brand new PC with USB3.2 support. The Kingston DataTraveler Max drives were well-reviewed and reasonably inexpensive so I bought a couple, one with a USB-C and one with a USB-A connector. They are indeed faster than any other drive I have so that's good. Of course there's bottlenecks and restrictions which will reduce the overall speeds somewhat. In my case, I do not get 900MB/s speeds writing to the drives. Instead I'm getting closer to 520MB/s which is nowhere near the claimed speed nor that on various review sites but way faster than my other USB3.0 drives. So these are doing the job reasonably well. Only one complaint - these are ridiculously large. I'm not sure why they chose a plastic sleeve that was 3.25 inches long. I'm willing to bet the internal memory chips are on a very small circuit board like every other drive. So that's an odd choice on Kingston's part.

Your mileage may vary, but initial testing has gone very well in my niche application. I have a 2017 MacBook Pro (i5-7267U/8 GB RAM, four Thunderbolt 3 ports only) running Windows 10, and I am out of drive space, but I need to install some large software to take on the road with me. I was going to buy an external m.2 chassis, but I thought I would give this drive a try, instead, since it is about 1/3rd the price of what it would cost me to buy an external m.2 chassis, m.2 drive, and Thunderbolt 3 cable. It's also a small fraction of the size and weight. The software in question is already running on my 2022 desktop PC (Z690/i5-12600K/32 GB DDR5/Samsung 980PRO m.2 boot drive, Windows 11) from a 10 years old Kingston 240 GB SSDNow V300 SATA SSD that was pulled from my old Dell laptop. I ran CrystalDiskMark on the old drive in the new PC, because the software runs fine at that speed. The Kingston DataTraveler Max 256 GB is giving me about twice the speed in sequential read/write and about half the speed in random read/write. The SATA drive is NTFS, and the USB drive is exFAT, but that probably doesn't matter. As you can see from the CrystalDiskMark screenshot, I am pulling the advertised 1000 MB/s even from this relatively ancient and obsolete MacBook Pro, so it definitely works fine on a Thunderbolt 3 port using Apple's Boot Camp Windows drivers. I did not include a screenshot of the old drive's results, so as not to confuse people. This is probably going to be fine, but I am installing the software right now to see how well it actually runs on the MacBook Pro, running from the USB-C stick. It will take hours to install, since the developer specifies 140 GB of drive space, and my WiFi is only pulling about 100 Mb/s. If the software doesn't run very well, it will likely be more to do with the difference in memory, CPU, and GPU between the two machines, not the drive speed. Although Kingston is not the only brand of memory and storage I trust, I have relied on Kingston products for decades, and this product gives me every reason to extend that trust. The DDR5 RAM in my desktop PC is also Kingston. Update: After 3 weeks on the road, I can say this drive performed flawlessly in my application.

This is a garbage USB drive. Does it write 900 MB/s? Yes, but only in synthetic benchmarking apps like CrystalDiskMark. When transferring actual files in Windows, you'll get 450 MB/s...but for only about 5 to 20 seconds. Then the drive will start to get hot and throttle to as low as 20 MB/s. Then it will shoot back up to 150 MB/s for a few seconds before throttling back down again. Repeat. I tested this on a laptop with Thunderbolt 3 ports. Also, the USB C connector doesn't actually retract. The cover slides over it but still exposes the port from underneath. That's a cheap solution. The drive is a bit wide and will unnecessarily cover up a nearby USB slot. And having a slightly crooked USB connector doesn't help. See photos. I may have to exchange this or just return it. Disappointing effort by Kingston, a reputable manufacturer.

Ok

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ممتاز

Okay, I did not expect to geek out over a flash drive, but here we are, and wow, this little thing is a total beast. File transfers feel like straight-up sorcery. I dumped a whole folder packed with giant video files and boom, it was done in seconds. No joke. It's crazy fast, super slick, and small enough to slip right into my laptop bag without even noticing. Honestly? Couldn’t be more impressed. Totally worth the price, if not more.

Este es mi tercer dispositivo, asi que quiere decir que estoy muy satisfecho con este producto. Las velocidades de lectura y escritura son como estan descritas. Sin embargo, si la actividad de lectura y escritura es sostenida por algun tiempo, por ejemplo, al hacer la clonacion de un disco, las velocidades empiezan a bajar bastante. Pero como esto es un uso infrecuente en mi caso, entonces es aceptable. La forma rectangular alargada es un poco rara, y en posicion horizontal podria colgarse un poco, pero como es muy ligero, no importa. Su luz LED azul es muy útil.