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Altoid

Member

Registered: 2017-05-07

Posts: 1,764  

Caveat emptor -> Kingston DataTraveler Exodia M USB 3.2

Hello:

I will try to make it short.
This is just a heads up for forum members, not a thread to discuss anything.

To wit:
Do not purchase a Kingston Kingston DataTraveler Exodia M USB 3.2.
It is an utter piece of crap and you will be wasting your money.

After my +10 year old and very reliable Data Traveler DTS9 USB 2.0 drive went south, I purchased three of these at ~ US$10 ea.
Did not bother with any research as all Kingston drives I have used in the past gave me no grief and worked prefectly well.
No issues, ever.

They are labelled as USB3.2 but as USB drives are all backwards compatible, I saw no problem.
And besides the on-board USB 2.0, my box also has a good quality USB 3.0 PCIe card.

I did not think to look but after running these tests I noticed that read / write speeds are not stated anywhere in the packaging.
Just says USB 3.2 Gen1, whatever that is these days.

So the next time I need to purchase a USB drive, I will check on-line first.
The Kingston brand name is no longer reliable for me.

This is how it is detected by Devuan Daedalus:

$ sudo dmesg
--- snip ---
[ ]usb 3-1.1: new SuperSpeed USB device number 3 using xhci_hcd
[ ] usb 3-1.1: New USB device found, idVendor=0951, idProduct=1666, bcdDevice= 0.01
[ ] usb 3-1.1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[ ] usb 3-1.1: Product: DataTraveler 3.0
[ ] usb 3-1.1: Manufacturer: Kingston
[ ] usb 3-1.1: SerialNumber: E0D55EA57403F76139331987
--- snip ---
$

I ran these tests.
Other tests were consistent with these results

# dd if=/dev/random of=/media/groucho/EXODIA64/tmp123 bs=1048576 count=3072
3072+0 records in
3072+0 records out
3221225472 bytes (3.2 GB, 3.0 GiB) copied, 406.307 s, 7.9 MB/s
#

# dd if=/dev/random of=/media/groucho/EXODIA64/tmp123 bs=1048576 count=3072
3072+0 records in
3072+0 records out
3221225472 bytes (3.2 GB, 3.0 GiB) copied, 399.216 s, 8.1 MB/s
#

The first run is on a USB 3.0 socket on a hub at the front of the box and the second from one at the USB 3.0 PCIe card at the back of the box, there is no big difference.

I got a ~+25% write speed increase with a stream of zeroes.

$ cat /dev/zero | pv > /media/groucho/usb1/tmp123
3.00GiB 0:04:36 [10.8MiB/s] [   <=>   ]
$ 

Thinking I had been duped and had fallen for fake Kingston hardware, I searched and found a great many posts with complaints about Kingston, their new marketing practises and these USB drives which seem to be QLC type which would (?) explain the absurd write speed performance.

But it gets worse: not only the complaints line up with what I have experienced with the ones I purchased, I have also read a post that complains about data rot after only two months.

Now you know.
As always, YMMV.

Best,

A.

Last edited by Altoid (Yesterday 12:45:26)

yurimodin

Member

Registered: 2025-06-09

Posts: 17  

Re: Caveat emptor -> Kingston DataTraveler Exodia M USB 3.2

USB sticks can be hit or miss. I tend to avoid all things TeamGroup since their SSD's were dropping like flies at work.

I have had the best luck with MicroCenter branded USB thumbdrives......You don't have to live near a MicroCenter either I ordered them from Amazon. Cool thing is they also have a LED that blinks when their is r/w going on.

Camtaf

Member

Registered: 2019-11-19

Posts: 474  

Re: Caveat emptor -> Kingston DataTraveler Exodia M USB 3.2

I bought 3x 32GB DataTraveller G4 USB3 pendrives, & whilst they are OK to read from, they are abysmal to write to & take hours to fill, literally!

I now just use them to play music from....

Altoid

Member

Registered: 2017-05-07

Posts: 1,764  

Re: Caveat emptor -> Kingston DataTraveler Exodia M USB 3.2

Hello:

Now you know.

Indeed ...

I submitted a review to Kingston:

I made the mistake of relying on the Kingston brand name (as I have consistently done for the past 25+ years) and purchased three DataTraveler 64Gb Exodia M 3.2 USB drives.

The read / write speeds are short of absurd.
There's no need to explain anything, Kingston engineers know all about it.

And now Kingston *also* knows that they have lost a client of 25+ years.
Recommends this product ✘ No

They wrote back and actually thanked me for the feedback.
Then had the gall to reply with this nonsense:

We apologize if you are dissatisfied with your product. The Exodia USB drive's are a basic low cost model with no minimum performance ratings based off the datasheet.

... no minimum performance ratings based off the datasheet?
Datasheet?
What datasheet?

Ahhh ...

They must be referring to the read/write data in the datasheet not included in the package nor transcribed anywhere in the package.
So, according to Kingston it could well be 0.5 Mb/s and it would be also a reasonable write speed for a USB 3.2 USB drive.

Like I said in my OP:

Caveat emptor.
It is an utter piece of crap, you will be wasting your money. 

Best,

A.