Kingston’s First USB 3.0 Flash Drive

Kingston Digital, Inc., has announced it is shipping its first USB 3.0 flash drive. The Kingston DataTraveler Ultimate 3.0 Flash drive takes advantage of the faster USB 3.0 specification that has up to ten times the data transfer rates of the current USB 2.0 specification.

The device has a read speed of 80MB/second and a write speed of 60MB/second. It is available in 16GB ($89.00), 32GB ($138.00) and 64GB ($270.00) capacities. To ensure backwards compatibility, Kingston is including a Y cable as some USB 2.0 ports require it to initialize USB 3.0 drives. During an internal testing on a particular system, a 1 hour 44 minute movie (3.9GB) was written to the drive in 1 minute 13 seconds, and a 2 hour 23 minute DVD (4.4GB) in 1 minute 23 seconds.

“The combination of speed and size makes it ideal for data backup or fast transferring of large files including music, photos and videos,” the press release says. The product comes out with a five-year warranty.

For your information, you can get the 16GB flash drive for $66.24, the 32GB for $99.95, and the 64GB for $201.56 at Amazon. kingston.com