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Kingston 2021 Limited Edition Mini Cow USB Flash Drive Review — cute and endearing little flash drive!
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Kingston 2021 Limited Edition Mini Cow USB Flash Drive Review — cute and endearing little flash drive!

by February 17, 2021
Overview
Highlights

Kingston's collectible flash drive comes in the form of a little cow this year. Extremely cute and just as limited as recent graphics cards, the Kingston 2021 Limited Edition Mini Cow USB Flash Drive is definitely a nice functional addition to your desk full of cutesy objects.

Warranty

5-year warranty

Price

RM89 (SRP)

Positives

+ Extremely cute packaging
+ Little cow has little feet to help it stand!
+ Competitive amount of storage for its price
+ 5-year warranty

Negatives

- None

Pokde Scoreboard
Pokde Rating
Appearance
9.0
Materials
8.8
Performance
8.0
Portability
8.6
User Experience
8.0
Value
8.0
Bottom Line

If you like cute stuff, there's no reason not to get this.

8.4
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We are facing shortages all over the world when it comes to PC components, making getting them quite hard. But what about something that you might never get to buy again once it runs out? Or you might have to wait for a good 12 years before they resurface? I am talking about the Kingston 2021 Limited Edition Mini Cow USB Flash Drive, a collectible flash drive from Kingston that is not only extremely cute, but also functional. Let’s give it a go.

Appearance

Kingston 2021 Limited Edition Mini Cow USB Flash Drive Review-5

Instead of arriving in a standard package, the Kingston 2021 Limited Edition Mini Cow USB Flash Drive comes in a milk bottle-shaped enclosure. The label even says Kingston Milk 100%, which is potentially misleading but this is quite possibly the cutest packaging that a flash drive can come in.

Kingston 2021 Limited Edition Mini Cow USB Flash Drive Review-2

Once you slit the tape that holds the upper half of the bottle, it comes off entirely to reveal a little cow held down by a hard plastic cover. The little cow is made of a hard rubbery material that sports a soft touch texture. While the “body” of the cow seems like it can take a beating, the material does seem like it will potentially become sticky and grimy after some time.

I don’t think Kingston expects you to use the Kingston 2021 Limited Edition Mini Cow USB Flash Drive and expose it to harsh environments much though. If you really do plan on using it everyday, there’s a little hole on its “tail” that allows you to attach a lanyard to carry it around with you more securely. It is worth mentioning that the Kingston 2021 Limited Edition Mini Cow USB Flash Drive is quite short, but is quite girthy for a regular flash drive.

Kingston 2021 Limited Edition Mini Cow USB Flash Drive Review-3

The flash drive portion is cleverly hidden as the “snout” of the Kingston 2021 Limited Edition Mini Cow USB Flash Drive. The whole drive is coated in a gold finish. The drive itself is really short, being not much longer than the USB connector itself, but the size of the snout might get in the way of adjacent ports.

Kingston 2021 Limited Edition Mini Cow USB Flash Drive Review-4

True enough, when connected to our motherboard, it blocks the adjacent port. It will not have an issue with my Cooler Master SL600M’s front panel though, as there’s sufficient space between each port. Whether you can use the Kingston 2021 Limited Edition Mini Cow USB Flash Drive without blocking out the port next to it depends entirely on the layout of your case’s front I/O, or in our case, the motherboard’s rear I/O.

Specifications

Interface: USB 3.0 (5Gbps)
Capacity: 64GB (57.6GB usable)
Rated speed: Read: 100MB/s, Write: N/A
Dimensions:  43.16 (L) x 28.96 (W) x 27.31 (H) mm
Included accessories N/A

Performance

The first thing we did was to format the drive to exFAT. FAT32 is a relic of a file system, and exFAT is far more optimized. For the real-world file transfer segment, we couldn’t even test the Kingston 2021 Limited Edition Mini Cow USB Flash Drive with the FAT32 file system, as some of our files exceed the 4GB file size limit of FAT32.

Synthetic

Kingston 2021 Limited Edition Mini Cow USB Flash Drive review CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark sees the Kingston 2021 Limited Edition Mini Cow USB Flash Drive deliver really good performance in CrystalDiskMark. Getting above 100MB/s read and write speeds is really impressive. Interestingly, the file system difference really makes a difference here, with us seeing the sequential write speeds nearly quadrupling after switching over to exFAT. Random 4K speeds are poor, but I guess that’s unavoidable given that this is merely a flash drive.

Kingston 2021 Limited Edition Mini Cow USB Flash Drive review Anvil Storage Utilities

Anvil’s Storage Utilities see similar results. The Kingston 2021 Limited Edition Mini Cow USB Flash Drive delivers good enough sequential performance, but poor 4K speeds. Given how most people use flash drives, you shouldn’t worry too much about the 4K random speeds. Here the difference in performance between exFAT and FAT32 isn’t nearly as stark.

Real world

Kingston 2021 Limited Edition Mini Cow USB Flash Drive review real world transfer

The real world performance is good when larger files are involved. Speeds are impacted when you transfer smaller files, but this is a common situation even when it comes to much faster NVMe drives. The fastest transfer rate we see is around 9MB/s for the tiny documents, while the larger compressed files saw speeds of up up to 31MB/s.

Kingston 2021 Limited Edition Mini Cow USB Flash Drive review cost per GB

From a cost-per-GB perspective, the Kingston 2021 Limited Edition Mini Cow USB Flash Drive is actually quite well-positioned. While it may not be as fast as some of the other drives in this list, it is still more affordable than most of the other external storage drive solutions. Not to mention that this is the smallest of the ones we have tested.

Conclusion

The Kingston 2021 Limited Edition Mini Cow USB Flash Drive offers pretty good value for your money, with it priced at RM89. Adding on to that is the fact that this is a collectible item, and considering how the Chinese zodiac only cycles once every 12 years, the Kingston 2021 Limited Edition Mini Cow USB Flash Drive will be relevant for the next 12 years. You can’t put a price on that. And it’s super cute, which is yet another thing that you can’t put a price on.

If you want one of these, I would definitely recommend just collecting them instead of using them as you won’t be able to replace them if you happen to lose yours. Given how often cute stuff gets stolen, I can see this going “missing” very easily.

Kingston 2021 Limited Edition Mini Cow USB Flash Drive Review-1

With that said, you might not have to buy it to own one. True to Pokde.net’s tradition of #BossTerbeliDua, we will be giving away one of the Kingston 2021 Limited Edition Mini Cow USB Flash Drives to one lucky winner. Stay tuned for our giveaway post on our social media channels!

Our thanks to Kingston for sending us the Kingston 2021 Limited Edition Mini Cow USB Flash Drive!

About The Author
Vyncent Chan
Technology enthusiast, casual gamer, pharmacy graduate. Strongly opposes proprietary standards and always on the look out for incredible bang-for-buck.

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