If you are looking for an easy and affordable way to move a lot of data, a USB drive still is the least expensive way. An USB drive works in almost every device and you aren’t dependent on a working internet connection. That’s why I always have a few of them lying around. In this review I’ll tell you more about the Kioxia U301 and Kioxia U365 USB drives. The brand name Kioxia may not be familiar to you, but it is the memory branch of Toshiba that has been split off. So you can be assured that the quality of these drives is very good.
The Kioxia U301 and U365 drives
Both USB drives are available in several memory sizes. For this review I’ve got the Kioxia U301 in 128 GB size and the Kioxia U365 in 256 GB size. You can buy the U301 in 16, 32, 64 and 128 Gb. The more luxurious U365 is available in 32, 64, 128 and 256 GB. Both drives support USB 3.2 Gen 2, so transfer speeds should be fast and reliable. And of course both drives are backwards compatible with older USB protocols.
The Kioxia U301 comes in white with a transparent cap. Normally I’m not really a fan of caps because they always seem to get lost. But in this case Kioxia has thought about that as you can put the cap on the back of the drive when you are using it. That still isn’t a guarantee that you wont loose it, but will reduce the risk somewhat. The U301 I’m testing in 128 GB size costs about 20 euro. The Kioxia U365 is a bit more luxurious and comes with a sliding USB connector. When not in use the connector is slid back in to the drive to keep it safe and clean. The mechanism works very well with a reassuring ‘click’ when you slide it back. The U365 in 256 GB size costs about 45 euro.
Speed
One of the downsides of all the USB drives I have is that they are quite slow. Transferring files withs speeds of 10-20 MB/s isn’t really going to work when you have 128 or even 256 GB of space. Luckily these Kioxia drives offer far greater speeds with their USB 3.2 Gen 2 connection and fast memory. The 128 GB Kioxia U301 produced very nice results with read speed going up to 139 MB per second in crystal disk mark. Copying about 10 GB of 70 MB raw files from the USB drive to my PC I consistently got speeds of about 110-120 MB per second. Writing data to the drive was done with 26 MB/s in the benchmark.
The 256 GB Kioxia U365 was even faster with read speeds going all the way up to 229 MB/s in crystal disk mark. Those are almost SATA SSD speeds! Writing data to the U365 produced more modest results with about 41 MB/s. Not as fast as the read speeds, but still very respectable for a ‘simple’ USB drive. Copying the same set of 10 GB raw photo files of 70 MB each the drive reached about 145 MB/s.
Kioxia Reliability
Reliability has never been a problem with any of the Kioxia (Toshiba) products I’ve reviewed in the past. And I’m happy to report the U301 and U365 didn’t disappoint in that regard. Both worked without any problems, even when stress testing them in the crystal disk mark. And Kioxia is confident you won’t run in to any problems with these drives as they give you a 5 year limited warranty on both drives.
Conclusion
When you are looking for a fast and reliable USB drives both the Kioxia U301 or U365 are great options. The U301 is a bit cheaper and available in sizes from 16 to 128 GB. If you want a stick without a cap, need a bigger size (as the U365 is available in sizes from 32 up to 256 GB) or need the absolute fastest option I’d choose the U365.
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You leave out one extremely important and I would have thought obvious feature – does it have an read/write access LED?
Hi, no there aren’t any LED’s on these. Though I must say I haven’t seen an USB drive with a LED in a very long time. Seems that isn’t a sought after option anymore these days.
I’ve recently bought the Kioxia U301 USB flash drive and noticed at least 3 things you should have mentioned in your review:
temperature: the flash drive overheats easily. I couldn’t measure how hot it is, but you’d better wear gloves when taking the drive out of USB port.
formatting: this Kioxia drive is formatted into fat32 by factory. If you want to format it to exfat, you can do so in the tool built into Windows 10, but the formatting time was 2,5~3 hours (256 GB U301). How big was the file allocation size in your flash drives tested here? Was it 128 kB (by factory)? I left this value intact. Is this move proper?
different speed in copying files: maybe you didn’t notice, but when it comes to copying a single file, the copying speed may reach 100 MB\s (tested on a 430 MB video). Try copying more files (also these put into a directory) – you’ll see the speed drops to 30 MB\s. I saw these speeds in a pop-up window shown when copying files (not in an external tool).
Maybe I wrote the recent comment way too fast because I own a Kioxia U365 256 GB flash drive, but didn’t unpack that before writing this.
Going back to the U365: this flash drive is WAY worse than U301! Seriously, the same size, the same USB standards, the same USB port, but the copying speed is MUCH lower than declared! The write speed hardly ever exceeds 10 MB\s. I didn’t have such issues with U301. The reformatting time (into exfat) was similar – 2,5~3 hours. I left the same value (as in U301) of the file allocation size – 128 kB.
Why was the copying speed lower in U365 than in U301 despite the fact I inserted both into the same USB 3.0 slot?
Your review lured me to buy Kioxia U301 and U365 flash drives. Kioxia U301 256 GB is better (as long as you have protective gloves to eject this hot drive) than U365, so I can’t recommend the latter.
And final note: I saw the write speeds in the pop-up window when copying files. I didn’t use Crystal Disk Mark as the creators wrote a disclaimer stating this software may shorten your USB flash drive’s (and SSD’s) lifespan.