INTRODUCTION

   If you've been purchasing and downloading movies and series from digital/online stores then you should already know just how much space is required to store all of them in a media library. The other day i went to check my personal media collection to see how much free space i had on that particular hard drive and i noticed that just a single folder with the first season of a 10+ year old series took over 60GB of storage. Normally this wouldn't be an issue but when you have to take some movies with you on a trip (obviously can't take your entire media collection with you) you need either a portable hard drive or a high capacity USB flash drive. Lucky for all of us USB flash drive prices have taken a huge dive over the past few years so today there are even 128GB affordable models available among which is the brand new DataTraveler Micro 3.1 model by Kingston.

   Kingston Technology Company, Inc. is the world’s largest independent manufacturer of memory products. Kingston designs, manufactures and distributes memory products for desktops, laptops, servers, printers, and Flash memory products for PDAs, mobile phones, digital cameras, and MP3 players. Through its global network of subsidiaries and affiliates, Kingston has manufacturing facilities in California, Taiwan, China and sales representatives in the United States, Canada, Europe, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, Australia, New Zealand, India, Taiwan, China, and Latin America.

   Just like the DataTraveler SE9, MicroDuo and Mini lines the DataTraveler Micro 3.1 line is also aimed towards people who are primarily looking for a very compact, durable and affordable USB flash drive with plenty of available storage. The DataTraveler Micro 3.1 line also features a metal enclosure (probably zinc alloy), USB 3.1 Gen.1 connectivity (basically USB 3.0) and according to Kingston the 128GB variant which we have here today can achieve read performance of up to 100MB/s and write performance of up to 15MB/s. Performance may not impress but simply put right now there's just not enough space inside such compact USB flash drives to house high-performance components (more specifically a controller and NAND flash modules). There's still hope however since Kingston always likes to use "smaller" performance numbers compared to the ones we get so let's check and see just how fast the new DataTraveler Micro 3.1 128GB USB flash drive really is.