The Basics:

There is not much to discuss regarding the drive itself. As mentioned, there is a metal (Aluminum) rectangular body with a plastic end that features a triangular cut out to be connected to a lanyard / key chain. Nothing is provided for making any such connection, though. The drive also does not have a cap or any other means for truly protecting the USB 3.0 connection. The drive can simply be slid in to an open USB port as is, and when not in use you just have to do your best to keep the connection safe / clean.



The image below shows an angled view of the drive where you can see the blue coloring used to designate a USB 3.0 drive. As usual, it is also backwards compatible for use with USB 2.0 ports.



Testing:

To test the performance of the Kingston DataTraveler Mini 16GB USB 3.0 flash drive we will run it through a few synthetic benchmarks: USB Flash Benchmark, CrystalDiskMark, and ATTO Disk Benchmark.

USB Flash Benchmark:

The screenshot below summarizes the results from USB Flash Benchmark, which details the read/write speeds when transferring various file sizes. What we see is that the published specifications of 70MB/s read and 10MB/s write can be met and exceeded when transferring larger file sizes, but as happens with almost all USB flash drives, the real world performs trails off with smaller files. I would say this test confirms that the published specifications are accurate, which is a good thing, except that I was hoping for a miracle and that the rather pokey write speed of 10MB/s was just a very conservative fingure.