By Akim Green
Manufacturer: Kingston Technology Corporation
Product Name: DataTraveler Vault Privacy 3.0 Flash Drive
Model Number: DTVP30AVAV/64GB
UPC: 5054533533011 EAN: 5054533533011
Price As Tested: $162.99 (Amazon | Newegg)Full Disclosure: The product sample used in this article has been provided by Kingston.
Nowadays it seems personal data is constantly targeted for unauthorized access; whether remotely or by physically means. AES encryption has been stellar in its ability secure data, especially in its 256 bit implementation whose encryption takes an exponentially long time to brute-force hack, even on today’s fastest machines. The DataTraveler Vault Privacy 3.0 Flash Drive, which uses a more secure XTS-AES encryption and is FIPS-197 certified, is aimed towards business users who deal with sensitive data. Benchmark Reviews evaluates this digital storage device to see how well it performs in securing a users precious files.
Regular USB drives can be encrypted using built in OS features or third party software. While effective these methods are not optimal: they use the computers resources and drives encrypted this way are no more secure than the OSs’ used to encrypt them, in some cases. Storage medium with dedicated crypto hardware alleviates the problem by using an on board cryptographic processor responsible for scrambling the stored data.
In this review, we will evaluate the speed and security of the drive: testing its performance with some benchmarks as well as exploring some typical use cases.
- ESET Antivirus Protection
- Business Grade Security
- SuperSpeec (USB 3.0) technology
- FIPS-197 certified and TAA compliant
Technical Specifications:
- Speed:
USB 3.0: 250MB/s read, 85MB/s write
USB 2.0: 30MB/s read, 20MB/s write - Dimensions: 77.9 mm x 22.2 mm x 12.05 mm
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Waterproof: Up to 4 ft.; conforms to IEC 60529 IPX8. Product must be clean and dry before use.
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Operating Temperature: 0°C to 60°C
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Storage Temperature: -20°C to 85°C
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Minimum System Requirements: Two (2) free drive letters required for use
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Compatible with: Windows 10, Windows 8.1, Windows 8, Windows 7 (SP1), Windows Vista® (SP2), Mac OS X v.10.7.x -10.11.x, Linux v. 2.6.x
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Note: DataTraveler Vault Privacy 3.0 Anti-Virus is not compatible with Mac OS or Linux.
Hardware based encryption, without a hardware interface to enter a password may make a flash drive less versatile than regular USB sticks. Does the DTVP30AV in turn, possess any unique or special functionality to compensate for this shortcoming? Enabling and disabling full disk encryption on a drive is a timely, resource intensive task using OS or third party software. Disks encrypted this way are known to perform slower in certain scenarios, is the DataTraveler Vault Privacy 3.0 ‘s transfer also speed affected by the encryption process? We attempt to answer these questions in the following section.
Test Hardware:
- Microsoft Surface Pro 4
- Desktop:
– i5 6500
– Gigabyte H110M-A
– Corsair LPX 2400MHz
– Adata SP550 128GB
Windows 10:
- CrystalDiskMark
- VirtualBox
– Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
Construction
Despite a plastic-like feeling, the casing of the unit is actually constructed of aluminum.The sides of the drive are reinforced by rigged plastic panels to reduce shock damage from drops and such, and the unit is waterproof to boot. Curiously, Kingston doesn’t mention the water resistance in online store descriptions, but this is possibly because the drive is only water resistant with the cover attached. The size of the DTVP30AV may seem unusually excessive but it is necessary to house the additional encryption hardware and improve heat dissipation.
Functionality
The primary function of this device is to protect the users data. The DTVP30AV performs this duty very well and does not sacrifice performance. It is only compatible with certain operating systems; in order to unlock drive’s primary partition, an applet located on a small read only volume must be executed which will prompt the the user
must enter his/her password:
As a result, it is impossible to use the drive as a boot medium. A relatively complex password is required and it is recommended you record it elsewhere or commit it to memory. The software also allows the drive to be accessed in read only mode.
If the password is forgotten, you will have ten attempts to enter it before all user data is destroyed. Once unlocked, the user is free to format (to exFAT or NTFS) and populate the disk as desired. The DTVP30AV does not allow creating partitions using the Disk Management utility in Windows.
Kingston offers three variants of the DTVP30AV: the managed version with SafeConsole management software, the standard version – with just encryption capability, and the antivirus edition being reviewed. The antivirus installation pops up whenever the drive is inserted. It would nice if it were possible to disable the message.
The software is pre-licensed for five years. After downloading, the antivirus program will be installed to the flash drive for a portable setup.
The antivus software is somewhat resource intensive and runs every time the drive is unlocked. There is no option alter the virus scan frequency, the only changeable paramerter is language.
Performance
Since the drive is hardware encrypted, we can decrypt it by entering the password, but we cannot turn off encryption. Nevertheless, the DTVP30AV excels in performance: it is faster than a traditional hard disk drive but slower than some SSDs; running programs off the drive should not be a problem, however faster non encrypted USB 3.0 drives do exist .
The speed of the flash drive(above) is decent compared to the ADATA SP500 128GB SSD(below).
If your main drive is a traditional HDD, applications stored on the flash drive may load faster from the DTVP30AV. The graphs below show the speed of the drive when reading and writing a large file:
Copying the files from Desktop to the flash drive:
In a VirtualBox Ubuntu 16.04 LTS installation (2 dedicated cores, 3GB RAM), the DTVP30AV was used to store the virtual disk image, in other words, the flash drive was acting as the drive hosting the OS in this virtual setup. The computing experience on this machine was very smooth: Firefox for instance takes a second or two to launch, and office applications such as Libre Office Writer ran near instantaneously. For security reasons(presumably), when the PC is turned off or put to sleep, the drive will “eject” itself, it is therefore necessary to close any application running on the drive beforehand. Otherwise, the experience was not much different from using an SSD to store the VDI. Additionally, there was no real perceivable difference in speed or responsiveness when running portable applications such as Eclipse off the flash drive vs a SSD.
The construction of the drive is reassuringly sold. It is definitely built to last; a mix of metals and hard plastics tightly assembled ensures the DTVP30AV survives minor drops and even spills. The USB connector is also very sturdy and does not exhibit any twist or wobble.
Unlike Kingston’s DT2000 which used a keypad to unlock the drive, the DT30VP is reliant upon an OS for accessing the storage. This is not necessarily a flaw, since the DTVP30AV allows for more complex passwords and is less prone to unwanted access.Otherwise, the unit performs well enough to run programs such as Eclipse, and can conveniently be essentially used as an encrypted hard disk in a virtual OS .
In typical day to day usage, the DTVP30AV performs about as well as Kingston states; reading 80MB/s and writing 250MB/s, sometimes faster. On rare occasions when the anti-virus is busy and the data is being written, the drive will get warm and the write speed drops to less than 70MB/s. When the drive is plugged in to the back of my desktop beside the rear exhausting fan, this throttling does not occur.
In terms of dollars per gigabyte, the DTVP30AV is more expensive than most SSDs. Priced at $162.99 (Amazon | Newegg) the DTVP30AV may not entice the general consumer, those interested in encrypted drives and do not require the antivirus are recommended to take a look at the cheaper standard variant.
The Kingston DTVP30AV does not disappoint; it operates at remarkable bandwidth and keeps one’s data safe from unauthorized breaches and malware. It is definitely a product to consider if you are in the market for portable, encrypted storage.
+ XTS-AES encryption
+ Robust build, waterproof
+ Impressive Performance
– Expensive
– Unlocking drive takes a few seconds
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Performance: 9.50
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Appearance: 9.00
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Construction: 10.00
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Functionality: 8.50
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Value: 8.00
