Kingston has made a yearly offering by releasing themed USB Flash Drives each year for quite some time now. This year, they’re doing it again by releasing the Data Traveler Mini Dragon USB Flash Drive for 2024 which also coincides with the year of the Dragon of the Chinese Zodiac. We have a review copy sent in by Kingston over the Christmas break and we’ll look into how it performs and packaged.
Table of Contents
Mini Dragon USB Design and Packaging
As with all the Kingston Mini Chinese Zodiac USB Flash Drives from before, the Zodiac Animal design comes in a cute representation, this time a mini green dragon showing up behind a cloud. The material is made of a rubber material akin to rubber used on colorful kid erasers. It stands roughly around an inch high without the USB Flash drive and just around an additional half inch when the drive is stored. The USB Flash drive itself is colored gold and serves as the dragon’s crown/mohawk. The Mini Dragon USB has a keyring loop on its tail.
The Mini Dragon USB Flash Drive comes in an egg-shaped packaging, mimicking a dragon’s egg. While it looks cute, it does however pale in comparison to the previous releases which has a more whimsical approach with the drive’s packaging, example: 2023 Mini Rabbit USB Flash Drive came in a carrot juice bottle.
Mini Dragon USB Performance
Pulling the data from the product release we posted a week ago, we have:
Capacities1: 128GB
Speed3: USB 3.2 Gen 12 speeds; Up to 200MB/s Read, 60 MB/s Write
Dimensions: 31.7 x 33.63 x 40.24 (mm)
Warranty/support: 5- year warranty with free technical support
Compatible with Windows® 11, 10, Mac OS (v.13.2.x +), Linux (v. 2.6.x +), Chrome OS™
1 Some of the listed capacity on a Flash storage device is used for formatting and other functions and thus is not available for data storage. As such, the actual available capacity for data storage is less than what is listed on the products. For more information, go to Kingston’s Flash memory guide at kingston.com/flashguide.
2 USB 3.2 Gen 1 Performance requires a host device with a USB 3.2/3.1/3.0 port
3 Speed may vary due to host hardware, software, and usage
The actual usable drive space for the Mini Dragon is around 115GB based on Windows Storage. However, this release from Kingston doubles the size from last year’s Mini Rabbit. This makes the drive much more
Checking the Mini Dragon USB Flash Drive’s speed through Crystal Mark, tested read speed is at 244MB/s maximum, and write speed is at 109.59MB/s, a much higher result than what was provided by Kingston. To further test read and write speed, I have moved around one 9GB video file from a PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD to the Flash Drive and vice-versa. The USB port used supports USB 3.2 Gen1.
The resulting file transfer nets a result of having a transfer time of 4:37 minutes from SSD to the Mini Dragon, while it only took around 46 seconds to transfer from the USB drive to the SSD. The observed write speed to the Mini Dragon had a brief burst of 80MB/s+ for around 15-20 seconds but then settled (or throttled) down to an average of 30MB/s+ for the rest of the transfer. When transferring the video from the USB to the SSD, it had a consistent transfer speed of 200MB/s+, which is in line with Kingston’s specifications (of read speed). The read and write speed of the SSD should be considered as a non-factor as it has the fastest read and write speed, and the write speed to the SSD would be driven by how fast the Mini Dragon is able to read the file. While the write speed for large video files (>1GB) get throttled, I did another test using a 100MB+ file, which should be a typical file size that gets stored in a USB drive (examples: installers, zip files, large docs). The transfer speed averaged to around 100MB/s+ write speed to the flash drive.
Kingston Data Traveler Mini Dragon USB Flash Drive Conclusion
The Kingston Data Traveler Mini Dragon USB Flash Drive is one of those hard to miss collectibles if you are into collecting the entire line. It also makes a nice gift, for the new year or for someone who is born under the year of the dragon. It’s not just cute for its looks but it’s also a useful tool for storing files, now with double the size from the previous release (Mini Rabbit).
The Kingston Data Traveler Mini Dragon USB Flash Drive is now available through Kingston’s official Shopee or Lazada stores at a SRP of Php 1,190 while supplies last.
