Kingston Dual Portable flash drive review: Competitive performance, dual connectors

Price When Reviewed

512GB: $134 I 1TB: $157 I 2TB: $330

Best Prices Today: Kingston Dual Portable flash drive

Life is healthier in case your transportable flash drive can hook up with each Type-A and Type-C ports with out having to tug round an adapter. The Kingston Dual Portable packs each forms of USB connectors into its minuscule kind issue, and turned in an excellent, if not chart-topping efficiency.

The draw back? It’s presently priced practically twice the quicker competitors.

Read on to study extra, then see our roundup of the best external drives for comparability.

What are the Kingston Dual Portable’s options?

Much just like the Teamgroup X2 Max, Kingston’s Dual Portable is a small, skinny 10Gbps USB (3.2 Gen 2) flash drive with a Type-C connector on one finish and a Type-A connector on the opposite — each lined with caps. It’s quick with the typical knowledge load and hecka handy if you don’t know what sort of system you’ll want to hook up with.

The aforementioned minuscule kind issue is round 2.75-inches lengthy, 0.75-inches huge, and a mere 0.3-inches thick. The Dual Portable barely tipped the scales at a mere 0.4 ounces, so that you would possibly even overlook it’s in your pocket.

The Dual Portable’s controller is a Silicon Motion SM2322 and the NAND is 3D TLC. Likely NAND of a barely older technology given the low sustained native write charge noticed throughout our 450GB write take a look at.

The drive carries a five-year guarantee that’s solely restricted by, say, smashing the drive with a hammer or writing its full capability each two hours. In different phrases, you’ll be fantastic.

How a lot is the Kingston Dual Portable?

You might have seen, SSD costs, after a protracted inexorable drop, are on the rise once more. That would possibly clarify why the Dual Portable is $134 within the 512GB capability, $157 within the 1TB, and a whopping $330 for 2TB.

Or it may not. The 2TB model of the mighty Teamgroup X2 Max was solely $150 on Amazon on the time of this writing — lower than the 1TB Dual Portable! Average worth for a 1TB was round $110. Kingston’s pricing on this product is puzzling to say the least. But hey, it’s crimson!

How quick is the Kingston Dual Portable?

The Dual Portable’s efficiency is greater than satisfactory for the typical consumer, although it was eighth out of 10 flash/thumb drives I’ve examined. In different phrases, it’s no Teamgroup X2 Max, however neither is every other small form-factor flash drive I’ve examined.

However, the Dual Portable simply bested the 10th place SanDisk Extreme Pro Dual.

Thought it’s eighth out of 10 flash drives, the Dual Portable’s efficiency is just marginally weaker than the pack’s in CrystalDiskMark 8.

The sample was clear by the point we obtained to the 48GB switch exams. The Dual Portable can dangle with the X2 Max in some exams, however not general.

The Kingston Dual Portable was method off on the 450GB write, however just like the Samsung Extreme Pro Dual, it was a 1TB drive. The Teamgroup X2 Max was 2TB in capability, nonetheless, it nonetheless sustained round 700MBps writing even once we fed it a whopping 1.4TB.

Below you possibly can see the rationale for the prolonged 450GB write time. The Dual Portable drops to 120MBps when it runs out of secondary cache. Not best, but it surely didn’t happen till 200GB had already been written, so the typical consumer will seemingly by no means see one of these slowdown.

All in all, except you pile a complete lot of knowledge onto it without delay, the Kingston Dual Portable will get the job carried out performance-wise.

Should you purchase the Kingston Dual Portable?

If Kingston comes again to earth with its pricing (our sticker shock value the product half a star), then the twin connectors, small profile, and good efficiency with as much as medium knowledge units make it a worthy buy. That mentioned, I discussed the X2 Max quite a few occasions for a purpose.

How we take a look at

Drive exams presently make the most of Windows 11 24H2, 64-bit working off of a PCIe 4.0 Samsung 990 Pro in an Asus Z890-Creator WiFi (PCIe 4.0/5.0) motherboard. The CPU is a Core Ultra i5 225 feeding/fed by two Crucial 64GB DDR5 5600MHz modules (128GB of reminiscence complete).

Both 20Gbps USB and Thunderbolt 5 are built-in into the motherboard and Intel CPU/GPU graphics are used. Internal PCIe 5.0 SSDs concerned in testing are mounted in an Asus Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5 adapter card sitting in a PCIe 5.0 slot.

We run the CrystalDiskMark 8.04 (and 9), AS SSD 2, and ATTO 4 artificial benchmarks (to maintain article size down, we report solely the primary) to search out the storage system’s potential efficiency. Then we run a sequence of 48GB switch and 450GB write exams utilizing Windows Explorer drag and drop to indicate what customers will see throughout routine copy operations, in addition to the far quicker FastCopy run as administrator to indicate what’s potential.

A 25GBps two-SSD RAID 0 array on the aforementioned Asus Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5 is used because the second drive in our switch exams. Formerly the 48GB exams had been carried out with a RAM disk serving that goal.

Each take a look at is carried out on a NTFS-formatted and newly TRIM’d drive so the outcomes are optimum. Note that in regular use, as a drive fills up, efficiency might lower attributable to much less NAND for secondary caching, in addition to different components. This challenge has abated considerably with the present crop of SSDs using extra mature controllers and much quicker, late-generation NAND.