Kingston DataTraveler Max Review – 1TB and 1GB/s in a USB stick

By Faryad On Sep 4, 2021

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The Kingston DataTraveler Max is by far the fastest USB stick we’ve ever tested. While the speeds in our field tests are slightly lower than what Kingston promises, the Max gives all other flash drives a run for the money. You have to have a purpose that requires very high speeds and is USB-C compatible to be able to justify the high price, but then this stick is also the ultimate choice.

Pros

Extremely fast
Available in capacities up to 1TB
Five-year warranty

Cons

Requires USB-C connection
External SSD is often cheaper

Not much is happening on the market for USB sticks. However, Kingston is now making a sensational introduction with the DataTraveler Max, which should give the USB stick concept a flash forward to 2021. The manufacturer promises more than twice as fast read and write speeds as the fastest USB stick to date. That calls for a test.

The DataTraveler Max is one of the first USB sticks to exclusively have a USB-C connection. Until now, USB-C sticks have often been hybrid models, which also included USB-A for backward compatibility with older systems. This flash drive is clearly not designed for that. A USB 3.2 Gen2 signal, or 10Gbit/s USB, runs over that connector. That also explains that choice a bit, because USB-A ports are almost always limited to 5Gbit / s, especially with laptops.

Kingston specifies maximum read and write speeds of 1000MB/s and 900MB/s respectively, for all three capacities in which this stick is available: 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB. That is certainly impressive for a flash drive because the fastest USB sticks from brands such as Corsair, Sandisk, and Transcend did not exceed 440MB/s until now. Despite empty marketing slogans such as ‘USB 3.1’, they still use 5Gbit/s-USB without exception, which was once introduced as ‘normal’ USB 3.0, but can now even be called USB 3.2 Gen1 .

Why does a USB stick have to be so fast, you may ask. Especially in the larger capacities in which this DataTraveler Max is available, that can really be an added value in our opinion. Do the math: to fill a 256GB USB stick with a speed of 50MB/s, which is fairly normal for cheaper USB sticks, it takes you almost an hour and a half. With 400MB/s, as achieved by the fastest sticks to date, that is done in just over ten minutes and in theory this Kingston stick should be able to do it with 900MB/s, which limits the time required to less than five minutes. For all these examples, it goes without saying that you have to double the time once or twice for a stick of 512GB or 1TB.

Casing

The housing of the DataTraveler Max is made of hard, matte black plastic and has a hole to put it on your keys. With 82 by 22 by 9mm, the flash drive is quite large, but the weight of 12g is not too bad, with the choice of material for the housing certainly helping. Like most modern USB sticks, the DataTraveler Max features a sliding mechanism to protect the connector when not in use.

Internal

We opened the DataTraveler Max 512GB to view its internal components. The controller used is a Silicon Motion SM2320 chip, which the manufacturer, best known for its SSD controllers, announced today . The SM2320 is a combined SSD controller and bridge to USB, which can drive flash memory with four channels.

Silicon Motion is sparing with details about the controller part. An ECC error correction algorithm is supported, as is 256-bit AES encryption. The controller can handle up to 4TB TLC or QLC flash memory.

The 512GB stick uses two flash memory packages of 256GB each. The imprint of the chips reads FB25608UCM1-7C. Unfortunately, the part number decoder for Kingston’s flash chips isn’t publicly available, but given the company’s purchasing history, we suspect it’s Micron or Kioxia TLC flash. There is no separate dram cache present, there may be a small cache in the controller.

Prices

The suggested retail prices for the Kingston DataTraveler Max are 108 euros for 256GB, 156 euros for 512GB and 265 euros for 1TB. This makes it somewhat more expensive than, for example, the Sandisk Extreme Pro, especially in the lower capacities, but the 1TB version is reasonably priced. Kingston gives a five-year manufacturer’s warranty on these sticks.

Test method

We test USB sticks largely in the same way as, for example, memory cards and external SSDs. Although the accents are sometimes a bit different, the usage scenarios for such products are quite similar. To begin with, we test both read and write speeds when copying one large 10GB file and a thousand 5MB files. The first scenario can be compared to transferring an archive file or film, the second test corresponds to copying photos and, for example, music files.

In addition, we run the synthetic Crystal Disk Mark test on the flash drives. That benchmark tells us not only the maximum sequential read and write speeds, but also the speeds when processing medium (512kB) and small (4kB) files.

The test system we use for benchmarking has the same specifications as our SSD test system. That is based on an AMD Ryzen 7 3700X processor in an ASUS Prime X570-A Pro motherboard with 16GB of RAM. Windows 10 is of course installed on it, in the May 2020 Update flavor with version number 2004. We use a Samsung 970 EVO Plus as a boot disk so that the internal SSD is never the bottleneck in our practice tests.

Synthetic tests

In synthetic benchmarks such as CrystalDiskMark, fast storage media can best flex their muscles, because the overhead of a ‘normal’ file transfer is minimized and the speed of the internal storage does not matter. Many manufacturers therefore base their quoted speeds on this type of testing.

The Kingston DataTraveler Max excels in these tests, with sequential read speeds of 975MB/s and write speeds between 864 and 874MB/s. The larger versions are slightly faster. We see that more often, because the larger capacities can take more advantage of parallel writing to several flash chips.

Processing small files by definition involves more overhead. The Kingston DataTraveler Max reads 4kB files at 25MB/s, writing is considerably faster at around 80MB/s. This is also reflected in the intermediate size of 512kB. When writing, the 800MB/s is well exceeded, which means that the USB sticks are already moving towards their top speed, while the read speed is still slightly behind at 750MB/s. That is of course relative, because the fastest USB sticks to date are still thickly packed.

Practical tests

In practice, the speeds are often slightly lower. This applies to almost all USB sticks and therefore also to the DataTraveler Max. If we read a file of 10GB, it goes at exactly 640MB/s. We achieve comparable speeds when writing, only the 1TB stick can do that a little faster with 676MB/s.

It is more difficult to process a large number of smaller files. Here we read and write thousands of 5MB files, comparable in file size to, for example, music tracks and photos. In absolute terms, the speeds for almost all sticks are therefore considerably lower than in the practical test with a 10GB file. Nevertheless, the Kingston DataTraveler Max manages to achieve a very nice score: reading is consistently 500MB/s, while writing we note 455MB/s. Especially in the latter case, the Kingston sticks are really an order of magnitude faster than what was available until now.

Performance score

The USB stick Performance score is a weighted average of all tests performed, both the synthetic benchmarks and the practical tests.

We arrive at a score of around 230 points for all three capacities of the Kingston DataTraveler Max, making them more than three times faster than the Sandisk Extreme Pro 256GB. That series has been the go-to choice so far if you’re looking for a fast USB stick, and the Ultimate award winner from our round-up last year. The 1TB edition is just the fastest.

Conclusion

Kingston sets a new benchmark for the entire USB stick market with the DataTraveler Max. These flash drives are on average more than three times as fast as the fastest sticks you could buy until now. The popular Sandisk Extreme Pro, which holds two positions in the Pricewatch top three at the time of writing , has been left behind. Now the Sandisk remains cheaper in the lower capacities, but the 1TB versions are almost the same price.

Perhaps the DataTraveler Max competes even more with external SSDs. They are of course not as compact and use a cable, but are a lot more pleasantly priced. For example, you already have a Samsung T7 SSD for less than half of the DataTraveler Max 1TB , which is roughly the same speed. You then have to ask yourself how much the stick form factor is worth to you.

We don’t often see a manufacturer come up with a product that declassifies everything that was there until then. Now there was also room for that because other manufacturers seemed to find it fine in recent years. However, Kingston’s convincing way of doing it is quite unique. Although the DataTraveler Max is pricey and even many users will settle for slightly slower, but cheaper flash drives, an Ultimate award is well deserved in our opinion.