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Altoid

Member

Registered: 2017-05-07

Posts: 1,870  

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 (2025-06-26 12:45:26)

yurimodin

Member

Registered: 2025-06-09

Posts: 18  

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: 497  

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: 1,870  

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.

stargate-sg1-cheyenne-mtn

Member

Registered: 2023-11-27

Posts: 394  

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

see also this forum thread:

https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=7480

.

---

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Do unto others as you would have them do instantaneously back to you!

Altoid

Member

Registered: 2017-05-07

Posts: 1,870  

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

Hello:

... see also this forum thread ...

Yes.
As the OP, I was the one that posted a link to this thread on that one.  8^D

Best,

A.

kapqa

Member

Registered: 2019-01-02

Posts: 475  

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

if zou are keen on making a purchase, you can consult also here

https://ssd-tester.com/

edit: local shops here have mostly kingston drives, so most of the time getting those. but there shurely must be faster drives around the block somewhere.

Last edited by kapqa (2025-10-22 16:47:33)

Altoid

Member

Registered: 2017-05-07

Posts: 1,870  

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

Hello:

... shops here have mostly kingston drives ...

Same here, but without an official representative so it is more or less the wild west.

Not to mention all the fake/counterfeit crap with different brands stamped on them.

Moot point now as in light of my recent experience, Kingston is no longer the go-to brand I had purchased for almost 20 years without a second thought.
Not for USB sticks or SSDs for that matter.
Kingston has now gone the way of Seagate, Hewlett Packard, Texas Instruments, Sony and others.

The purchase of RAM sticks/modules is another matter as I expect that OEM branded hardware will be (?) properly specced, albeit more expensive.

Nowdays we will have to rely heavily on independent testing from whoever does that reliably.
ie: not sponsored or on a payroll.

With respect to IT gear, trust is something that takes a long time to build but once it is lost, that is that.

As always, YMMV.

Best,

A.

rolfie

Member

Registered: 2017-11-25

Posts: 1,327  

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

Nowadays before buying a stick I do look at if there are read/write specs on the websites, and if a data sheet is available. Some only offer read rates, they are dropped from the list. Sticks without any of that stuff are sorted out. I do not look at the cheapest price, I look for the size and a reasonable performance.

kapqa

Member

Registered: 2019-01-02

Posts: 475  

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

sony still has to invent a device with which it could disappoint me,
dont know were you get ur stuff from

but honestly, seagate drives are really good, maybe was just born in another era, cannot talk for HP (man those printers 970CXI are still fabulous, put pricey)

Kingston SSD are bit lame, but then we are not paying for them, i mean you can get SSD even bit way cheaper than HDD nowaaday, but would not have to tell you. but some of the fastest drives on the ssd-tester list should be kingston ones, so they can.
wish only they would still offer like samsung 840 850 since older macs like use them; please dont ask why i havent thrwn them to the garbage, yet.

would be nice if those flash disk could become faster, but last time i read, the wrote about super fast SDcard, like nvme speeds, so wonder what is holding the flash drives "back". but then most of my computer only have usb2.0, so guess not much of a deal to wait some hope for the "quantum leap".

Last edited by kapqa (2025-10-22 18:57:27)

kapqa

Member

Registered: 2019-01-02

Posts: 475  

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

what find more disturbing tan the speed of USB drive
is reliability of USB copy and how it handled on Linux ,

it can happend that you copy say an ISO and it says after 1-2 seconds that the copy is done, when in fact it is still writing to the flash drive and long time,
and there is no easy way to track reliably what is going on and when the copy is effectively finished;

this may happen across distro and across GUI, but certainly one of the biggest shortcoming of Linux overall; it may even happen that if you do something else or more things at once that the copy gets interrupted (or say you run a "get upgrade" and the whole copy-process is disturbed without you even knowing it - because it said copy done)