Kingston R500 16gb Review
Introduction:
The Kingston R500 series of flash drives are the fastest USB2 drives in the Kingston Personal range of USB sticks. Before purchase, I did a lot of research into this product and was amazed by the speeds people were getting, so I could not resist and bought one immidately. At this point, all I can say is that you will be impressed by the performance
Content/Features:
Internal memory: 15248mb (14800mb detected in Windows)
Interface type: USB 2.0
Read speed: 30 MB/s
Write speed: 20 MB/s
Compatibility: Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac OS v.10.5.x+, Linux v.2.6.x+
Colour of product: Black, Orange
Height 12.40 mm
Width 70 mm
Depth 22.68 mm
Special features: Plug and Play
Warranty: 5 Years
Package Contents:
Item comes in a little carboard package, as shown above, with the USB drive in clear view. If you dig far enough, the package also contains a small keyring of sorts; which I unfortunately lost within an hour of opening the package.
Testing and Benchmarks:
In this section, I will test out this badboy with one of my USB2 ports and one of my USB3 ports. Both are connected via USB headers on the motherboard respectively.
My USB3 header is on a Renesas D720200 chip, and my USB 2 header uses the Intel chip on my P67 onboard chipset.
I will be using ATTO Disk Benchmark on all my tests.
USB2 Testing:
Test 1:
Test 2:
Test 3:
USB3 Testing:
Test 1:
Test 2:
Test 3:
Conclusion:
As you can see from my tests, the performance of this flash drive is impressive (or to me at least). First off, the rated speeds on the packet actually are the speeds you get. I have a ton of flash drives here, and few of them actually manage to do this. What makes this drive even better is that it can do much better than that; as you can see from my benchmarks, the performance I got when testing the device on my USB3 port beat those of the USB2 port! I was not expecting to see any performance differences, due to the fact that the device is supposidly USB2 - but a pleasent supprise is always welcome.
When benchmarking the device on my USB3 port, you can see that the gizmo managed to get to 35.6 mb/s read and 21.3mb/s write! Thats an extra 5mb/s when using a USB3 port, and a welcomed 1.3mb/s bonus on the write. Fantastic.
Overall, this device is well worth the money. The device cost me £15 (about $22.50) and was well worth it. You can buy flash drives of the same size for around £10, however given the performance I have seen while benchmarking this device I would definately buy this one.
If you are looking to put videos or large files on this device, and therefore require snappy speeds, this device is excellent. However, if you just want a USB drive for a few documents and maybe a bit of music; I would not recommend this drive - one can get a Kingston G3 16gb on Amazon for just under £10 and that would be perfect for those not storing large files.
Rating: 9/10
This was my first review, so it would be great if those with more experience or simply those with opinions could post below and tell me how I could improve in the future.
