Kingston DataTraveler Max Type-A 256GB High Performance USB Flash Drive USB 3.2 Gen 2 Up to 1000 MB/s Sliding Cap Design DTMAXA/256GB

Use this for all bios updates and have multiple drivers due to the ease of use and incredible read and write speeds. The size is continent and the storage capacity is more than enough for most uses. The heat level has never been an issue and overall they work well!

I just bought two USB Gen 2 sticks. One was a brand I had never heard of, so I wanted a name brand (Kingston or Samsung or Hynix) to make sure one wasn't terrible.Well the good news on my off-brand stick is it was way better than expected. But then I put in the Kingston.I don't understand how it is so fast. I expected the 1000 MB/sec to be balderdash because even physical NVMe hard drives - and I am talking the best - reach around 750 MB/sec. That excellent off-brand Gen 2 usb stick I had just tested (and expected to be slower than an actual NVMe CHIP drive) came in at 550 MB/sec and I was super pleased.My kingston stick - 995.88 MB/sec - how?!? Thats faster than hardware CHIP drives! More impressive was total lack of degradation in speed - for those who do not know, that fast speed is Sequential Read, the fastest operation for a usb thumb stick. random read, then sequential write, then random write always slow down - a *good* USB Gen 2 stick might throw up a 550 MB/sec Sequential read, and end with 300 to 325 MB/sec random write, the hardest category. This Kingstons scores - 995.88, 996.74, 947.90, and 927.01 - minimal degradation! instead of a 40 percent downspeed from highest to lowest scores, this was roughly only a 7 percent decrease - it can Write as well as Read like a champion!Flabbergasted, I did not research and saw "Kingston is a rare breed for it is the first thumb drive that integrates both SSD controller and USB interface in a single-chip solution". They call this tech DataTraveler Max - and it works!!!Only cons - the plastic case, which is great for a plastic case, is still a plastic case. Its highly durable, but that means increased heat trapped. Although I got a 512 GB stick... I'd watch the temps if I tried to copy a massive data load all at once.But yeah its twice as fast as I expected USB Gen 2 to even be capable of, faster that NVMe chip-based external hard drives, and its write speed is three times as fast as a good Gen 2 stick. Strong recommendation from expert user, one who has learned a lot from buying cheapo stuff and crying.

Used this to install windows on a new computer - went at warp speed! Hard to lose with its size, and build quality was excellent. I've now stuck it on my keychain and its been holding up great. Plug and play, easy to use, no complaints.

FUNCTION: Excellent and fast.FORM: Cumbersome. For one thing, as flash drives go, these are ENORMOUS: 3-1/2"x7/8"x5/16". For another, the sliding cover is difficult to operate. In fact, the natural way of holding the drive actually makes sliding the cover yet more difficult to move. Out of frustration, I finally cut the cover off and substituted one of those simple USB end-caps. Having removed the sliding cover, I discovered that more than 1" of the drive's huge length is entirely gratuitous.

I often need to backup my data and prefer flash drives, but I always got frustrated with how long it takes with other common drives you can find at Best Buy or Walmart. This Kingston flash drive is great and is far faster at writing data with a greater storage capacity to boot! Would recommend for the speed alone.

Decided to buy a couple of brand new USB drives that were full-on USB3.2 devices to get the fastest speeds on my brand new PC with USB3.2 support. The Kingston DataTraveler Max drives were well-reviewed and reasonably inexpensive so I bought a couple, one with a USB-C and one with a USB-A connector.They are indeed faster than any other drive I have so that's good. Of course there's bottlenecks and restrictions which will reduce the overall speeds somewhat. In my case, I do not get 900MB/s speeds writing to the drives. Instead I'm getting closer to 520MB/s which is nowhere near the claimed speed nor that on various review sites but way faster than my other USB3.0 drives. So these are doing the job reasonably well.Only one complaint - these are ridiculously large. I'm not sure why they chose a plastic sleeve that was 3.25 inches long. I'm willing to bet the internal memory chips are on a very small circuit board like every other drive. So that's an odd choice on Kingston's part.

The write speeds are very fast. However, the length is extremely long and is a risk to bend/break the drive or the port it's in. Secondarily, I rate it 3/5 because of two reasons: 1) 5 stars for fast speed, no stars because it fried itself and windows no longer recognizes it as any kind of drive or mountable device. I dared approach the actual storage limit. I was using this as a media drive on a smart TV, copying files to it and watching them on the big screen. It worked. Until I got to about 8GB free, copying less than that in files to it. The process halted, frozen. Something with the chips onboard, the storage, or some kind of memory leak, caused it to infinite loop and fry itself somehow. I had to cancel the process after 15 minutes of "10 seconds left", end task it, and could never read the drive after that. Wasted my time and money. Orderd Feb 6, died Apr 13. POS product.