Review on Kingston DataTraveler 64GB 100 G3 USB 3.0 (DT100G3/64GB) - Black by Sean Young

I needed an extra USB drive to create a bootable USB drive to restore my new laptop. I saw this one for sale and didn't think twice (or read the reviews [my mistake]) because it was the Kingston brand. Upon arrival I realized something was wrong as this supposed USB 3.0/3.1 device was taking longer than usual to format. I tried moving files of different sizes - from small documents to lossy and lossless audio to uncompressed video - and they were all VERY slow to write to disk. I then decided to test the drive with several tools, most notably CrystalDiskMark and Speedout. Imagine my surprise when they both showed that this USB3 drive plugged into a USB3 port recorded less than a quarter the speed of a 10 year old USB2 flash drive plugged into the same port . Yes, LESS THAN A QUARTER the speed. I could move an entire 3.7GB MP4 movie to a USB2 in the same amount of time it would take to transfer 320MP3 audio files to a *new* 64GB USB3. Knowing that Revain would subsequently have issues with counterfeits, I ran another test to make sure the stick was genuine. To my dismay it was real. Kingston's quality has clearly dropped a lot. I'm not sure a fake doesn't work BETTER. What a sad state. Not only is this drive unsuitable for its intended use as a system recovery device, it is not even suitable as a backup device as it takes too long to store anything larger than a few megabytes. Buy something else.