Page 4: Testing, Conclusion
Testing
You get a bit less than 30GB of usable space. It is good for companies to use the power of 10 system instead of base 2 as it makes the drive seem bigger.
The DT Ultimate was scrutinized for weeks since we encountered a few things that made us scratch our heads. The DT Ultimate was used with a generic NEC based USB3 PCIe v2 controller card. These cards are supported well in Linux and the drive popped up on insertion in Kubuntu 10.04. In Ubuntu 10.10, the device wasn't recognized until we removed/added the xhci_hcd kernel module. This happened on each boot, but we were using the system for another things and it wasn't a true clean install. USB2 was no problem with the DT Ultimate. It worked just fine in all of our systems when plugged into a single USB2 port. We never needed the Y splitter.
When testing the DT Ultimate, I had a very good use for the drive as I'm in the middle of two houses right now. Copying my home directory between computers was a good initial test. The first two times this was done was fine. The transfer speed was around 45 to 50MB/s. After the contents were deleted and more documents placed, the transfer rates dropped to half. We tried running benchmarks on the drive to determine where the slowdown is, but the benchmark itself causes more issues. Each time we ran a write benchmark, the performance of the drive suffered until it was used normally for a bit. In real world use, this type of workload wouldn't occur like the benchmark.
To really see if it was a problem with small file writes, we took about 100,000 1KB files and wrote them to the drive which took a bit of time. Bulk transfers work well for very large files, not so much for smaller ones. This was expected. We wrote so many files to a folder that we couldn't even list the directory contents and had to format the drive. The performance of the drive was still good.
Needless to say, the slow down we encountered was an anomaly that we couldn't reproduce. Read speeds were consistently good at just above 80MB/s, regardless of file size. You could use this drive as a boot drive in a pinch since the access time is better than a magnetic hard drive. The drive already endured many write and erase cycles from our testing and it is still performing well.
There are two types of transfers that would be common. The first is copying a document directory full of text files and pictures and maybe a few video files. In this scenario, the DT Ultimate performed well. For a 15.8GB (16554052KB) home directory, it took 366 seconds. This comes out to about 44 MB/s for writing lots of files of varying size. We also found that EXT4 was the best file system to use.
The drive was formatted as exFAT, which is a Microsoft, patented, file system. The new SDXC specification calls for the use of exFAT and most OSes will be able to read and write to it. Linux has support through FUSE and there are beta kernel modules, but since this is a block device, we opted to remove exFAT and put an open source file system. As we said, EXT4 proved to be the best performer for this particular flash drive. XFS was a good performer for large files.
On large file transfers, we copied a Starcraft 2 ISO (7330272KB) to the DT Ultimate and it took 119 seconds. That yields write speeds of a bit over 60MB/s. This is were the performance writes come into play. You need big file transfers for this drive to flex its muscle. Using iotop showed the drive peaked at 65MB/s. When using USB2, it maxes out at 31MB/s. This is still pretty respectable and it probably maxing out USB2 real world bandwidth. Reads were the same.
All in all, the DT Ultimate performed very well and USB3 is a very worthy upgrade for the speed.
Conclusion
The DT Ultimate comes in a few different sizes. We reviewed the 32GB variant and it retails for $100 (Newegg Link, Amazon Link). This is a premium price for a flash drive. Like all new technology, you pay to get cutting edge performance and the Kingston DataTraveler Ultimate delivers on that promise. Bulk transfers times are cut in half with USB3 and the DT Ultimate and makes copying files more tolerable. We've seen the future and USB3 is it. Kingston's DataTraveler Ultimate is a good first step into the USB3 flash drive market.
You get a bit less than 30GB of usable space. It is good for companies to use the power of 10 system instead of base 2 as it makes the drive seem bigger.
The DT Ultimate was scrutinized for weeks since we encountered a few things that made us scratch our heads. The DT Ultimate was used with a generic NEC based USB3 PCIe v2 controller card. These cards are supported well in Linux and the drive popped up on insertion in Kubuntu 10.04. In Ubuntu 10.10, the device wasn't recognized until we removed/added the xhci_hcd kernel module. This happened on each boot, but we were using the system for another things and it wasn't a true clean install. USB2 was no problem with the DT Ultimate. It worked just fine in all of our systems when plugged into a single USB2 port. We never needed the Y splitter.
When testing the DT Ultimate, I had a very good use for the drive as I'm in the middle of two houses right now. Copying my home directory between computers was a good initial test. The first two times this was done was fine. The transfer speed was around 45 to 50MB/s. After the contents were deleted and more documents placed, the transfer rates dropped to half. We tried running benchmarks on the drive to determine where the slowdown is, but the benchmark itself causes more issues. Each time we ran a write benchmark, the performance of the drive suffered until it was used normally for a bit. In real world use, this type of workload wouldn't occur like the benchmark.
To really see if it was a problem with small file writes, we took about 100,000 1KB files and wrote them to the drive which took a bit of time. Bulk transfers work well for very large files, not so much for smaller ones. This was expected. We wrote so many files to a folder that we couldn't even list the directory contents and had to format the drive. The performance of the drive was still good.
Needless to say, the slow down we encountered was an anomaly that we couldn't reproduce. Read speeds were consistently good at just above 80MB/s, regardless of file size. You could use this drive as a boot drive in a pinch since the access time is better than a magnetic hard drive. The drive already endured many write and erase cycles from our testing and it is still performing well.
There are two types of transfers that would be common. The first is copying a document directory full of text files and pictures and maybe a few video files. In this scenario, the DT Ultimate performed well. For a 15.8GB (16554052KB) home directory, it took 366 seconds. This comes out to about 44 MB/s for writing lots of files of varying size. We also found that EXT4 was the best file system to use.
The drive was formatted as exFAT, which is a Microsoft, patented, file system. The new SDXC specification calls for the use of exFAT and most OSes will be able to read and write to it. Linux has support through FUSE and there are beta kernel modules, but since this is a block device, we opted to remove exFAT and put an open source file system. As we said, EXT4 proved to be the best performer for this particular flash drive. XFS was a good performer for large files.
On large file transfers, we copied a Starcraft 2 ISO (7330272KB) to the DT Ultimate and it took 119 seconds. That yields write speeds of a bit over 60MB/s. This is were the performance writes come into play. You need big file transfers for this drive to flex its muscle. Using iotop showed the drive peaked at 65MB/s. When using USB2, it maxes out at 31MB/s. This is still pretty respectable and it probably maxing out USB2 real world bandwidth. Reads were the same.
All in all, the DT Ultimate performed very well and USB3 is a very worthy upgrade for the speed.
Conclusion
The DT Ultimate comes in a few different sizes. We reviewed the 32GB variant and it retails for $100 (Newegg Link, Amazon Link). This is a premium price for a flash drive. Like all new technology, you pay to get cutting edge performance and the Kingston DataTraveler Ultimate delivers on that promise. Bulk transfers times are cut in half with USB3 and the DT Ultimate and makes copying files more tolerable. We've seen the future and USB3 is it. Kingston's DataTraveler Ultimate is a good first step into the USB3 flash drive market.