The stick feels rather robust. The silver coloured bits are not plastic, they are real aluminium and you feel it every time you handle the stick. It also features a strong carrying clip with a Kingston logo, which means it can easily be attached to just about anything. Don’t let looks fool you. We were a bit concerned that the logo might not stand up to punishment very well. However, two months later they remained in surprisingly good shape and more often than not the stick was carried around in a pocket full of keys and change.

The white dot above the Kingston logo is in fact an LED that lights up in a nice shade of blue when the stick is in use.

The choice of blue connector is not accidental; it denotes that we are dealing with a USB 3.0 stick. Some additional information has been laser cut into the connector itself.

When inserting the stick, it should always be held by the immovable back part, otherwise it will just slide back over the connector. There were no detection issues on any of the systems we plugged it into.



Since the edges are not curved, the DataTraveler Ultimate 3.0 G3 looks a bit bulkier than it really is, although it is no bigger than other drives in its class, such as the Kingston HyperX or Corsair FlashVoyager. All these sticks have a drawback. They are simply too big to be used next to each other in adjacent USB ports. Modern laptops and desktop cases take this into account, so the USB ports on them are not grouped closely together. The DT Ultimate 3.0 G3 will block the adjacent USB port if it’s close, for example if you are trying to plug it in to the back of your motherboard.