Just purchased two drives from OCUK - kingston datatraveler70 128gb believe may be faulty?

user100monkey · 14 Sep 2022 at 22:24

Evening gents,

Looking for some help, i hope this is the correct place to post this.

I just ordered:
Kingston 128GB DataTraveler 70 USB Type-C 3.2 Gen 1 Flash Drive (DT70/128GB)

Problem is that it transfers at 60mb/s for about 10 seconds, then drops down to 1mb/s
I thought this drive would be fast, now i am starting to think that its faulty.
I am copying large 2gb files, i have formatted the drive to NTFS, and ensured drivers at up to date.

On the same order i ordered;
Seagate Expansion 2TB External Portable Hard Drive (STKM2000400)

Copying the same file to this drive, i get a constant file transfer speed of 134mb/s
Which i was rather surprised about, i thought this product had a 5000 RPM standard hard drive,

so two questions really, does anyone know of any good drive software to query the HDD within the Seagate, and todo some diags on the Kingston to see if its faulty?

Snapshot · 15 Sep 2022 at 07:25

CrystalDiskInfo should give you the details of your Seagate drive and H2testw is good for testing memory cards and flash drives.
It might be worth re-formatting the DataTraveler to the original exFAT to see how that behaves.

user100monkey · 15 Sep 2022 at 11:37

Thanks for the reply on this Snapshot, re-formatting did nothing, think its a faulty drive at this point.
I'll raise it with OCUK and see what they say

lsg1r · 15 Sep 2022 at 11:59

Honestly, that Kingston drive probably isn't faulty...

Budget usb sticks, and that kingston would be deemed budget, often perform nowhere near what they say they will in my experience. You'll get an initial blast of speed and then it will go down to really low speeds (I've seen 1-2MB/s on cheap drives).

60MB/s for 10 seconds is just over 512MB so the odds are it has a 512MB cache which is why you see the 'headline' 60MB/s speed and then you get the 1-2MB/s which is likely what the actual memory module write speed is. Yes I don't like this marketing either.

As to the seagate drive, 130MB/s at 5000 rpm is pretty normal these days, I get around that going to my 5200rpm 2.5inch drive from ssd's over usb 3.something (given up with their numbering scheme)

Testing - seagate seatools for seagate drive (might even see kingston, it sees my crucial drives), crystaldiskinfo for general testing

I've had fairly good experiences with sandisk extreme drives, albeit an older model.

digitaldreams · 15 Sep 2022 at 12:38

Most usb sticks start off fast due to both windows and the drives own caches, then speed drops to the miserable norm. I use Sandisk Extreme Pro sticks and they too start off blazingly fast at 250mb/s or so then drop to as low as 80-125Mb/s, way below quoted speed yet better than the old usb 2 jobs.

user100monkey · 15 Sep 2022 at 14:19

@lsg1r - What a great reply, that totally makes sense that it fills up the fast cache, then drops down to 1mb. Sounds logical.
Though selling a USB drive with a 1mb write speed seems crazy in this day and age.

Sorry i just re-read what i posted
"Copying the same file to this drive, i get a constant file transfer speed of 134mb/s
Which i was rather surprised about"
Surprised in a good way, wasn't expecting to get as high as 134mb/s, wasn't implying that it was slow.

darael · 15 Sep 2022 at 14:32

As @digitaldreams has already hinted at, the best USB stick you can get these days is the Sandisk Extreme Pro, which is quite fast. But I even got sick of my Sandisk Extreme Pro's slowdowns and it was quite frankly embarrassing to use.

I've seen the light and now use a Sabrent M.2 drive in a USB-C enclosure. This thing kicks the stuffing out of most, or even all, USB sticks in terms of file transfer speeds. Better still, I don't recall seeing it once slowing down like the USB sticks have done on me.

lsg1r · 15 Sep 2022 at 14:33

user100monkey said:
@lsg1r - What a great reply, that totally makes sense that it fills up the fast cache, then drops down to 1mb. Sounds logical.
Though selling a USB drive with a 1mb write speed seems crazy in this day and age.

yeah it is, in all honesty if you want a fast usb drive the best option is one of the ssd based options, say a samsung t7 or similar, or to get an nvme/sata ssd and a case (I repurposed an old 120gb sata ssd like this) for it but both they're considerably more expensive. The sandisk extreme like I said isn't a bad option though if you want to keep the prices down though.

Sorry i just re-read what i posted
"Copying the same file to this drive, i get a constant file transfer speed of 134mb/s
Which i was rather surprised about"
Surprised in a good way, wasn't expecting to get as high as 134mb/s, wasn't implying that it was slow.

Luckily my reply to that works both way so no worries there