Kingston 64 GB USB Drive: Cheap But Slow

Less than a year ago I reviewed several great USB Flash drives, all nice and fast and around 4 gigabytes in capacity. One I liked a lot was the Kingston DataTraveler HyperX, but at the time the $131 list price put it at $60 bucks more than the average. Even the 8GB version at the time was $266.

This week Kingston announced the DataTraveler 150 series, and they're massive. Not in size (it is a thumb drive) but capacity: 32GB and 64GB. Better yet are the prices: $108 and $177 direct, respectively. Amazon is selling the drives for even less, at $63.36 and $118.99, respectively.

How does Kingston make the drives so capacious and so cheap? EverythingUSB believes Kingston is using MLC (multi-level cell) Flash memory, which is less expensive than SLC (single-level cell). It's also slower.

The DataTraveler 150 is apparently running around 28 to 30 megabytes per second (MBps) read speeds and 8-MBps writes. That first number is pretty good, but the second number is about half of what I got when testing the HyperX a few months ago. In fact, it's so slow that the 150s do not support Windows ReadyBoost when used with Vista. (Full story Link)