At a glance
Expert's Rating
Pros
- Small thumb drive form factor
- Both Type-C and Type-A connectors
- Very good 10Gbps performance with normal amounts of data
Cons
- End caps aren’t captive
- Writes slow to 120MBps after 200GB
- Very pricey at the time of this writing
Our Verdict
The Kingston Portable Dual is one of the faster dual Type-C/A flash/thumb drives I’ve tested — holding its own against the top-rated Teamgroup X2 Max in some synthetic benchmarks. But peculiarly, it’s being priced way above the competition at launch.
Price When Reviewed
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Best Pricing Today
Best Prices Today: Kingston Dual Portable flash drive
Life is better if your portable flash drive can connect to both Type-A and Type-C ports without having to drag around an adapter. The Kingston Dual Portable packs both types of USB connectors into its minuscule form factor, and turned in a very good, if not chart-topping performance.
The downside? It’s currently priced nearly twice the faster competition.
Read on to learn more, then see our roundup of the best external drives for comparison.
What are the Kingston Dual Portable’s features?
Much like the Teamgroup X2 Max, Kingston’s Dual Portable is a small, thin 10Gbps USB (3.2 Gen 2) flash drive with a Type-C connector on one end and a Type-A connector on the other — both covered with caps. It’s fast with the average data load and hecka convenient when you don’t know what type of device you’ll need to connect to.
The aforementioned minuscule form factor is around 2.75-inches long, 0.75-inches wide, and a mere 0.3-inches thick. The Dual Portable barely tipped the scales at a mere 0.4 ounces, so you might even forget it’s in your pocket.
The Dual Portable’s controller is a Silicon Motion SM2322 and the NAND is 3D TLC. Likely NAND of a slightly older generation given the low sustained native write rate observed during our 450GB write test.
The drive carries a five-year warranty that’s only limited by, say, smashing the drive with a hammer or writing its full capacity every two hours. In other words, you’ll be fine.
How much is the Kingston Dual Portable?
You may have noticed, SSD prices, after a long inexorable drop, are on the rise again. That might explain why the Dual Portable is $134 in the 512GB capacity, $157 in the 1TB, and a whopping $330 for 2TB.
Or it might not. The 2TB version of the mighty Teamgroup X2 Max was only $150 on Amazon at the time of this writing — less than the 1TB Dual Portable! Average price for a 1TB was around $110. Kingston’s pricing on this product is puzzling to say the least. But hey, it’s red!
How fast is the Kingston Dual Portable?
The Dual Portable’s performance is more than adequate for the average user, though it was 8th out of 10 flash/thumb drives I’ve tested. In other words, it’s no Teamgroup X2 Max, but neither is any other small form-factor flash drive I’ve tested.
However, the Dual Portable easily bested the 10th place SanDisk Extreme Pro Dual.
Thought it’s 8th out of 10 flash drives, the Dual Portable’s performance is only marginally weaker than the pack’s in CrystalDiskMark 8.
The pattern was clear by the time we got to the 48GB transfer tests. The Dual Portable can hang with the X2 Max in some tests, but not overall.
The Kingston Dual Portable was way off on the 450GB write, but like the Samsung Extreme Pro Dual, it was a 1TB drive. The Teamgroup X2 Max was 2TB in capacity, however, it still sustained around 700MBps writing even when we fed it a whopping 1.4TB.
Below you can see the reason for the lengthy 450GB write time. The Dual Portable drops to 120MBps when it runs out of secondary cache. Not ideal, but it didn’t occur until 200GB had already been written, so the average user will likely never see this type of slowdown.
All in all, unless you pile a whole lot of data onto it at once, the Kingston Dual Portable will get the job done performance-wise.
Should you buy the Kingston Dual Portable?
If Kingston comes back to earth with its pricing (our sticker shock cost the product half a star), then the dual connectors, small profile, and good performance with up to medium data sets make it a worthy purchase. That said, I mentioned the X2 Max numerous times for a reason.
How we test
Drive tests currently utilize Windows 11 24H2, 64-bit running off of a PCIe 4.0 Samsung 990 Pro in an Asus Z890-Creator WiFi (PCIe 4.0/5.0) motherboard. The CPU is a Core Ultra i5 225 feeding/fed by two Crucial 64GB DDR5 5600MHz modules (128GB of memory total).
Both 20Gbps USB and Thunderbolt 5 are integrated into the motherboard and Intel CPU/GPU graphics are used. Internal PCIe 5.0 SSDs involved in testing are mounted in an Asus Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5 adapter card sitting in a PCIe 5.0 slot.
We run the CrystalDiskMark 8.04 (and 9), AS SSD 2, and ATTO 4 synthetic benchmarks (to keep article length down, we report only the first) to find the storage device’s potential performance. Then we run a series of 48GB transfer and 450GB write tests using Windows Explorer drag and drop to show what users will see during routine copy operations, as well as the far faster FastCopy run as administrator to show what’s possible.
A 25GBps two-SSD RAID 0 array on the aforementioned Asus Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5 is used as the second drive in our transfer tests. Formerly the 48GB tests were done with a RAM disk serving that purpose.
Each test is performed on a NTFS-formatted and newly TRIM’d drive so the results are optimal. Note that in normal use, as a drive fills up, performance may decrease due to less NAND for secondary caching, as well as other factors. This issue has abated somewhat with the current crop of SSDs utilizing more mature controllers and far faster, late-generation NAND.
Best Prices Today: Kingston Dual Portable flash drive
Author: Jon L. Jacobi, Contributor, PCWorld
Jon Jacobi is a musician, former x86/6800 programmer, and long-time computer enthusiast. He writes reviews on TVs, SSDs, dash cams, remote access software, Bluetooth speakers, and sundry other consumer-tech hardware and software.