DataTraveler Elite - 256mb product reviews

Well at first glance I did not think much of the device. I thought it was going to be just like any other flash drive. The one thing that did put me off slightly is that the cap that covers the USB plug is not attached to the unit.

The unit can operate just like any flash drive but it comes with more. Load the software that comes with the unit and the data traveller becomes a secure vault to store what ever you would like it to, with a password that you select.

The drive can even be divided in two with a secure part and a non secure part for access to the drive for all those on the fly things that dies not require security.

The application that comes with the data traveller is something unique in that you can specify the drive name set the password and even eject the drive safely without touching the windows tool bar.

What ever you do not forget you password as resetting this will lose all the data on the drive. This just go to show how secure your data can become. The fact that you have used a password on the unit des not make it useless should you lose it but the person picking it up is not going to have access to the data however they would be able to use the drive.

The unit is really good and I would not go with out it myself. In short well worth the difference between this puppy and the just a run of the mill pen drive

In this day and age, 128 megs of portable storage is hardly enough, 256meg is fairly standard, and 1Gig is really the benchmark to aim for... however, if it's a case of 'The bare basics will do for now, while I save up for something decent" then this is certainly a great option. With the highly secure AES 128-bit encryption hardwired into the unit with a dedicated chip keeping the transfer speeds up and the CPU-hogging of the PC's resources at a minimum, this is possibly the best system I have seen in it's price bracket.

I thought I'd try and test the stated transfer speeds, and I regret to say that with 12 runs of a 160meg file, being read and written to both the Privacy Zone and the Public Zones, the times differed from the advertised ones. Here's what I got...

PUBLIC Zone, no on-the-fly encryption: Read - 8.34 seconds (19.185 mb/sec), Write - 19.09 seconds (8.381 mb/sec)...
PRIVATE Zone, on-the-fly encryption active: Read - 12.21 seconds (13.104 mb/sec), Write - 20.55 seconds (7.786 mb/sec)...

So even though there are speed discrepancies, this unit still rocks! Supplied with 2 on-board applications to help you configure and controll your pendrive's behaviour, this is a ready-to-run system indeed. Standard with all modern Kingston pendrives (it seems) is TravelerSafe+, an easy to use utility for setting up your Private Zone and logging in to it each time. This is a mixed blessing, in one big regard. When you first plug it in, the utility is, of course, in the Public Zone. Run it, configure how much of the drive you want converted to Private Zone, and of course the whole data gets wiped clean. Then it slaps itself back into the freshly-shrunk Public Zone.

Now, plug the drive back in, you are presented with Public Zone, no password required... and the configuration utility. Sure, you can't access the Private Zone without the password... but you can tell it to erase the entire drive and convert it all back to Public Zone, no password required still! Really folks, would it have been so difficult to require that if a password has been set, the user actually enter it BEFORE allowing the system to run the configuration tool? Small glitch... Sure, the supplied ReadMe PDF (which gets wiped upon setup, if you don't copy it off first) says "You should not leave this on your pendrive..." but if you remove it, how do you log into your Private Zone on another PC, unless you have pre-installed it there earlier? Maybe I'm missing something basic here, but that just strikes me as a little naive of the software designers.

Also supplied gratis on the drive is MyTraveler... this is a PC-based application that allows you to reconfigure the behaviour of the pendrive's Insert-Alert and Eject-Alert events. You build a profile (stored on the pendrive of course) that contains selectable or customised drive icons, alert sounds, and also allows you to set the unit's Drive Label. This is dinky indeed. hardly functionally-important, but these days style counts too.

You can also go to the Kingston website and download NonAdmin.exe, which allows all the applications to run on a system that has an Admin account, but in non-admin accounts... this would be handy if your boss trusts you to run your own apps, but won't impart the Admin account password to you, because that would annoy the technical staff seniors.

The only other TEENY TINY niggle I had was that the Write-Protect switch is actually a software key... so if for any reason you can't get into the settings software, you're stuffed if you want to write data. A little dip-switch on the side is still me preferred method of protection, it give me the choice moment by moment, software be damned.

Overall, this is a great unit, and I suspect a 4gig unit would be the ultimate in 'leet geekdom (until they bring out the 8gig version), but for now, I would be totally happy with a 1gig or 2gig version... 256meg just wouldn't cut it with the amount of data I carry to and from work each day, and I suspect I am far from alone in this.