Kingston has just announced their very first USB 3.0 flash drives, in the form of a portable and compact SSD stick. Called the DataTraveler Ultimate 3.0, it is Kingston’s first dive into the superfast highway of thumb drives. The drive itself is said to be able to pull up some decent fights with speed of up to 80MB/sec and write speeds of 60MB/sec. It’s available in a trio of sizes of 16GB, 32GB and 64GB, with a five-year warranty affixed to each. Typical thumb drives’ limited warranty thought. Sadly, with all SSDs, the great news only stops at the speed. As with the price, it’s regrettably to say that such speed and capaciousness would stun you for a few second before taking out your cherry card, as these fellows are priced at $89, $138 and $270 in order of mention.

Inside the drive is a Jmicron JMF612 controller, the same controller used in Kingston’s value SSDs. Kingston connects the JMF612 via two ribbon cables to a separate PCB with four Toshiba NAND devices on it. It’s important to note that SSDs get their performance by reading from/writing to many NAND devices in parallel, so the use of multiple (four chips in this case) helps.The result is a thumb drive that performs more like a value SSD rather than a traditional thumb drive. With the USB 3.0 connector built in, there’s no need to carry around an extra cable. Well, not exactly.

While you won’t find any problem running this tiny white knight on your typical USB 2.0 port (so as Kingston claim), the recommended method to ensure USB 2.0 compatibility is to use the supplied Y-cable in the packing. The USB 3.0 spec allows for more power over a single port than USB 2.0. Carrying the Y-cable is a pain in the shiny metal butt if your desktop and laptop do not have USB 3.0 ports, but one way or another you’re going to have to carry around some additional bulk if you want an external USB 3.0 SSD these days, so hopefully that won’t give much of a burden.

Somehow Kingston uses a lot of thermal padding inside the drive. This is rather due to the heat caused by the ‘many’ NAND chips in the thumb drive. During full operation, the drive surface can easily reach a temperature of 38 degrees Celsius (100.4F). Kingston stated that the DT Ultimate 3.0 have an operating temperature ranges from 0°C to 60°C (32F – 140F), but don’t worry about that as the 5 years warranty will easily cover that. Though it is always save to have a backup copy of your data at any time. Who knows when these NAND chips will fail you.

To put the sort of performance we’re talking about here in perspective, you can copy a full dual-layer 9GB DVD image from Kingston’s DataTraveler Ultimate 3.0 in less than two and a half minutes. However, the prices are still far fetching from current USB 2.0 devices’ prices. But it’s good to know that you do have a choice if speed is your concern.

[Kingston via Anandtech]