Kingston Data Traveller Micro 8 Gb Review - The Small Wonder
The evolution of flash drives needs no introduction, with ever growing storage capacity with blistering speed and plummeting price, flash drives today cater to everyone’s need and offers a rugged storage solution. Kingston one of the pioneers in flash storage from ages has brought us arrays of flash drives ranging from frugal and feisty data traveller series to the razor sharp hyperX series. Today we lay our hand on one of the recent release from Kingston stable i.e. DT Micro 8gb.
Unlike other clunky drives available in the market that boasts bigger chassis and unattractive design, DT Micro has been aimed at ultra-low size segment, featuring a measly chassis and a cool looking design. Initial impression was amazing; the drive amazed us by offering on par performance and a decent storage under such small footprints.
About the Company - Kingston is an America based private firm who excels in the production and research of flash memory based products. The largest producer of system memory, Kingston holds the crow for churning out plethora of innovative products to cater varied audience.
With DT Micro, Kingston is not setting any world records in USB drive throughput performance however providing a small solution to cater the need of those people who don’t like to carry bulky medium with them. A small smart solution to fulfill your daily needs is what Kingston is aiming with these drives.
Packaging and Specification
Initial impression for the drive was amazing; everyone that laid his eyes on the drive was left speechless for a moment. The sheer small size of the drives stuns everyone and the handful storage capacity is another icing on the top.
Unlike our previous interaction with Kingston flash drive packing, which was flashy, the packing of DT Micro is low profile and offers no major cosmetics that one would expect from such drives.
On a deeper thought the packing looks reminiscent of my first flash drive i.e. Kingston Data Traveller 1Gb. A brighter packing from the likes of LoVo series could have done wonders to such fancy drives.
Since the drive boats of smaller IC’s , the specification isn’t ground breaking but suffice to say its decent enough for general workloads
System Setup and Testing Methodologies
The drive was tested using an AMD A75 platform. Since only AMD A75 platform boast of integrated USB3.0 it was the obvious choice. The drive was formatted after every test and the test filesystem was exFAT. The reason to choose exFAT is cross platform compatibility and support for larger single files.
Rest of the system configuration and setup is mentioned below-
Processors:
Motherboard:
Graphics Card
Memory:
Power Supply:
Monitor:
Operating System:
USB Ports :
Software Benchmark:
Stressing and Benchmarks
The benchmarks that we are using to test the drives will be an assortment of both synthetic and real world test. The test will churn the most out of the drive inorder to test the oomph the drive boast of.
Follow up the first set of benchmarks that are carried using the USB3.0 SS interface.
Crystal Disk Mark -“ We used this stress testing benchmark for getting the precise numbers on this drive.
HDTune Pro - Another synthetic tool offering a lot more than benching. We used the inbuilt benching mechanism to gauge the flash drive.
Conclusion – UltraFlash Drives
With the release of DT Micro, Kingston has set new standards, providing with ultra-light and small form factor drives. Though not offering the best of performance well these drives were never aimed at the top end of the market.
There are many cons that these mini drives come with, to begin with there is no lanyard cable bundled . Other than the missing slot for lanyard cable, these drives boasts sub par write speed, though read speed is quite decent, writing large files can be a cumbersome task using these drives.
Since Usb3.0 is still infancy and lack of acceptance atm in desktops/laptops is a major grip to drives performance, this could be one of the reason for Kingston for not to swicth these miniature drives to USB3.0 standards. Whatever the reason maybe, a future compatibility is must and I hope kingston refurbish the drive with a speed boost and USB 3.0 support in near future. Overall if you are in the market for some flashy cute looking pen drive keep this in top of your list but being small has its downside as well, chances of misplacing DT Micro is very high. So keep your guard when using thes cute little monsters.
Pros-
Cons
The evolution of flash drives needs no introduction, with ever growing storage capacity with blistering speed and plummeting price, flash drives today cater to everyone’s need and offers a rugged storage solution. Kingston one of the pioneers in flash storage from ages has brought us arrays of flash drives ranging from frugal and feisty data traveller series to the razor sharp hyperX series. Today we lay our hand on one of the recent release from Kingston stable i.e. DT Micro 8gb.
Unlike other clunky drives available in the market that boasts bigger chassis and unattractive design, DT Micro has been aimed at ultra-low size segment, featuring a measly chassis and a cool looking design. Initial impression was amazing; the drive amazed us by offering on par performance and a decent storage under such small footprints.
About the Company - Kingston is an America based private firm who excels in the production and research of flash memory based products. The largest producer of system memory, Kingston holds the crow for churning out plethora of innovative products to cater varied audience.
With DT Micro, Kingston is not setting any world records in USB drive throughput performance however providing a small solution to cater the need of those people who don’t like to carry bulky medium with them. A small smart solution to fulfill your daily needs is what Kingston is aiming with these drives.
Packaging and Specification
Initial impression for the drive was amazing; everyone that laid his eyes on the drive was left speechless for a moment. The sheer small size of the drives stuns everyone and the handful storage capacity is another icing on the top.
Unlike our previous interaction with Kingston flash drive packing, which was flashy, the packing of DT Micro is low profile and offers no major cosmetics that one would expect from such drives.
On a deeper thought the packing looks reminiscent of my first flash drive i.e. Kingston Data Traveller 1Gb. A brighter packing from the likes of LoVo series could have done wonders to such fancy drives.
Since the drive boats of smaller IC’s , the specification isn’t ground breaking but suffice to say its decent enough for general workloads
- Capacities*8GB, 16GB
- Dimensions 1.008" x 0.657" x 0.331"
- (25.6mm x 16.7mm x 8.4mm)
- Operating Temperature 32°F to 140°F (0°C to 60°C)
- Storage Temperature -4°F to 185°F (-20°C to 85°C)
System Setup and Testing Methodologies
The drive was tested using an AMD A75 platform. Since only AMD A75 platform boast of integrated USB3.0 it was the obvious choice. The drive was formatted after every test and the test filesystem was exFAT. The reason to choose exFAT is cross platform compatibility and support for larger single files.
Rest of the system configuration and setup is mentioned below-
Processors:
- AMD A8 3850
Motherboard:
- Asus F1A75 V-Pro
Graphics Card
- AMD 6550D (Llano IGP) + Asus 6670 ( Dual Graphics )
Memory:
- 2x2048Mb 1866 Mhz CL9 Kinston HyperX
Power Supply:
- Corsair VX450
Monitor:
- Samsung S2233SW
Operating System:
- Windows 7 64bit
USB Ports :
- USB 3.0 - ASMedia USB 3.0 / AMD A75 USB3.0
Software Benchmark:
- Crystal Disk Mark
- HDTune Pro
Stressing and Benchmarks
The benchmarks that we are using to test the drives will be an assortment of both synthetic and real world test. The test will churn the most out of the drive inorder to test the oomph the drive boast of.
Follow up the first set of benchmarks that are carried using the USB3.0 SS interface.
Crystal Disk Mark -“ We used this stress testing benchmark for getting the precise numbers on this drive.
HDTune Pro - Another synthetic tool offering a lot more than benching. We used the inbuilt benching mechanism to gauge the flash drive.
Conclusion – UltraFlash Drives
With the release of DT Micro, Kingston has set new standards, providing with ultra-light and small form factor drives. Though not offering the best of performance well these drives were never aimed at the top end of the market.
There are many cons that these mini drives come with, to begin with there is no lanyard cable bundled . Other than the missing slot for lanyard cable, these drives boasts sub par write speed, though read speed is quite decent, writing large files can be a cumbersome task using these drives.
Since Usb3.0 is still infancy and lack of acceptance atm in desktops/laptops is a major grip to drives performance, this could be one of the reason for Kingston for not to swicth these miniature drives to USB3.0 standards. Whatever the reason maybe, a future compatibility is must and I hope kingston refurbish the drive with a speed boost and USB 3.0 support in near future. Overall if you are in the market for some flashy cute looking pen drive keep this in top of your list but being small has its downside as well, chances of misplacing DT Micro is very high. So keep your guard when using thes cute little monsters.
Pros-
- Design
- Size
Cons
- Write Speed
- Missing USB 3.0
- Bundled Accessories/ Software
No, I saw that.. But then, people would have to know how big the Hyper X is to know how small the micro is.. :crazyeyes:
