Pop Series USB 3.0 16GB

Packaging & Contents

The Kingmax ships in a plastic bubble wrap. It’s a small simple no fuss package. On the front of the box we found claimed maximum read/write speeds of 66/11 MB/s and a 5 year warranty. On the back of the box there is a logo indicating windows 7 compatibility and the dimensions of the drive in several languages.

Box Front

Box Back

Dimensions & Weight

The Kingmax Pop measures 6.2cm long, 1.7cm wide and 0.8cm high which is below average in terms of total size and bulkiness for a flash drive. With these dimensions there is no chance that this drive will obstruct adjacent ports on a computer as it's barely thicker than the USB port. The Kingmax weighs 12 grams which is exactly the median weight of the 26 drives we have tested.

Build Quality

The body of Kingmax is reasonably solid and dense. There is no LED indicator on the drive but the cap attaches reasonably well. At the back of the drive there is a reasonably secure hole where a keychain can be attached. Overall the build quality is above average.

Front

Back

Test System

CrystalDiskMark Speed Test^[FAQ]

CrystalDiskMark is a free disk benchmarking utility that is very simple to use. It takes eight measurements: the read and write speeds in megabytes per second (MBps) for sequential, 512KB, random 4KB and 4KB parallel disk operations. There are more screenshots from this benchmark posted on the web than any other, probably due to its clean and simple display. There is further information, including instructions on how to benchmark your own drives, on the CrystalDiskMark wiki page.

CrystalDiskMark Score

The Kingmax put in a surprisingly good performance with sustained read/write scores of 93/21 MB/s. As with many flash drives the Kingmax struggled in the random write tests where it scored just 0.2 MB/s which is roughly in line with many of the flash drives we have looked at. The strongest relative area for the Kingmax Pop is in the random read test where it managed to score 8.7 MB/s which is a reasonable performance for a budget drive. Overall the performance of this drive is slightly above average for a USB 3.0 drive.

CrystalDiskMark Benchmark Speed Test

ATTO Disk Benchmark^[FAQ]

The Atto Disk Benchmark has probably been around for longer than any other disk benchmarking software, and you can tell from its dated interface! The utility was designed to measure regular disk drive performance but it's more than up to the task of measuring both USB flash drive and SSD speeds as well. The utility measures disk performance rates for various sizes of file and displays the results in a bar chart showing read and write speeds at each file size. The results are displayed in megabytes per second (MBps). There is further information, including instructions on how to benchmark your own drive, on the Atto wiki page.

ATTO Benchmark Speed Test

ATTO Score

The ATTO results of 70/28 MB/s sequential read/write for the Kingmax show lower read speeds and higher write speeds than the CrystalDiskMark test showed, the two tests usually confirm each other more accurately than that. Both sets of figures are significantly higher than the official figures of 66/11 read/write from Kingmax.

AS SSD Real World Copy Speed^[FAQ]

The AS SSD benchmarking program was recently developed specifically for benchmarking SSD's. The utility is able to take several measurements that are well suited to solid state drives. One of the tests, ISO copy, is also relevant to slower storage devices including flash drives. The ISO copy test places two large 500MB files in a folder on the drive and then times how long it takes to copy the folder to another location on the same drive. The result is reported in both MBps and time taken. It's a real-world test that gauges a drives ability to read and write at the same time. Drives that have a good balance between their read and write speed fare relatively well on this test. There is further information, including instructions on how to use it to benchmark your own drive, on the AS SSD wiki page.

Real World Copy Speed Score

This test shows that the Kingmax would take 60.86 seconds to create a copy of a large 1GB video file. This score is above expectations. Generally flash drives complete this test at roughly half their sequential write rates.

AS-SSD Copy Benchmark Speed Test

Conclusion

We are concerned about the reliability of the Kingmax Pop Series flash drives. We had to repeat several of our tests due to unknown I/O errors. The drive performed well above the manufacturers expectations on all completed tests but we saw a relatively large discrepancy between the ATTO and CrystalDiskMark scores which again concerns us. Overall the drive put in a decent performance considering its price and has a reasonably balanced performance profile. Assuming our test unit was suffering from a manufacturing glitch, this drive is a reasonable option at this time.

USBFlashPro
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Original Review by:  
Updated 11 years ago.