- Saturday, 21 November 2009
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Talk of virtue and your readers will become bored. Hint of gossip and you will secure perfect attention - Walter Winchell
DataTraveler 300 256GB USB Flash Drive
Product: DataTraveler 300 256GB USB flash drive
Website: www.kingston.com/256GBFlashDrive
System Requirements: USB port, Windows - 2000, XP, Vista, Mac OS, Linux
Price: £600
With the need for portable storage ever on the increase Kingston Technology has released the largest of the large USB flash drives at a whopping 256GB.
Is a beast like this really needed? Can the expense - six hundred quid! - be justified?
Kingston, in its own words, is aiming the 256GB drive at games and IT enthusiasts, movie and music junkies. With high definition movies in containers such as x264 and mkv extensions eating up storage, it makes sense to be going after those types of people, especially as they're usually early tech adopters.
Another market Kingston considers viable is netbook users. As netbooks are sold with SSDs as small as 8GB, having a very portable 256GB for extra storage seems an attractive proposition.
On a drive of this vast size, it's possible to house 365 CD images, 54 DVD5 ISOs or 10 Blu-ray single layer discs.
The manufacturer has used the highest density multi-level cell NAND chips to populate the 256GB flash stick, as opposed to single-level. It's a popular choice in USB drives, SSDs and hybrid HDDs currently as it results in more-megabytes-per-chip capacity.
Curiously enough, the drive arrived formatted in just FAT32, which at first we didn't take offence at until we remembered that Kingston boasted the drive's prowess in storing DVD and Blu-ray images. But this is impossible due to the 4GB limitation of the FAT32 file structure, although we're guessing the people that would store those ISO images on the 256GB drive would have a good idea how to reformat it.
Bundled in for security purposes is Kingston's Password Traveler software, which is used for segmenting a section of the drive that can be used to store files securely, accessible only by password. In a complete reversal of order, this cannot be used with NTFS and only with FAT32 making it an "either/or" USB drive in our books - either you can securely store small files, or insecurely store larger ones.
Kingston stated the DataTraveler 300 is capable of 20MB/s read time from the drive and 10MB/s write speed. We ran a series of performance tests, both in FAT32 and NTFS. The latter of which was hard to revert back to as Windows Vista doesn't like to format in FAT32 at that size.
In both formats the 256GB flash driver preformed better than this conservative estimate with a read speed of 29.2MB/s. We've also been told Kingston is improving the speed on the DataTraveler in the next iteration of the drive.
In Short
Having a flash drive that can hold one CD for every day of the year is all very well, but the cost will put most people off. Then again, most people will not want to buy or will even need a £600 256GB USB flash drive and those that do, will buy the drive no matter what anyone says.
There are clearly drives out there for less money and with more storage capacity, for example a 2TB HDD, with eight times that of the DataTraveler 300's capacity, costs a quarter of the price. At the other end of the spectrum, you have the likes of an external USB HDD by Iomega with roughly the same storage capacity of the USB stick at just over £50. But we've not seen anything else physically as small as this 256GB USB flash drive that's as easy to use. µ
The Good
Large capacity, small size
The Bad
Password protection software doesn't play nicely with NTFS
The Ugly
Price
Bartender's Report
7/10
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How come the Bartender's Report gives 8/10, but there's only seven full glasses?
256GB, thats bigger than the hard drive on my webbook (80GB), but costs more than my webbook all together... still none the less. i would soo love this... its my birthday coming up people, any1 wana buy me this? please ☺
May be aimed at people who have netbooks, but I would personally rather buy a hard drive upgrade or buy 2 new netbooks for the price of this!
"Curiously enough, the drive arrived formatted in just FAT32"
Not really curious - it's the "lowest common denominator" format, so will work out-of-the-box with any OS. Pretty much a no-brainer decision for any vendor...
On the other hand, what I find curious is the article author didn't realise this for themselves...
You say it is FAT32 and therefore cannot hold a copy of a DVD. Yes it can. The VOB files on DVDs are deliberately split into 1Gb chunks to avoid problems with file size. I cannot comment on Blueray disks though.
"The VOB files on DVDs are deliberately split into 1Gb chunks to avoid problems with file size."
True, but the author said image, like an .ISO file.
Anyway, I'd rather go for a 250Gb 2.5" USB HDD for around the £50 mark.
USB pendrives always get lost, nicked, stamped on, washed with your jeans, etc usually within a year.
£600 is too much for a throwaway item. A 2.5" slim external HDD is a much more cost effective solution.
Why lolly Gaagle About, perfect Unit for 1 Oz Overnight Mail Crowd W/ Internationale' ins.
Fits Into Jock Like Strap & wiggles about Oui La La. It might be good for something, yet Who Cares?
Ordered Case & Nieghbors Cactus Stole IT. OMG. Ate IT, Thats' Dry. Lucky ME.
O.K.ebay sell 'em for .59 Cents.
drashek
the other day at the jumble sale, only that one was fashioned to look like a Britannia Metal teapot. I reckon the Blue Peter kitsch set would fancy knack-knacks on The Antiques Roadshow, but I'd prefer a more stylish Q Must get them in the stores for Christmas.
...but the main problem is the p1sspoor speed of teh DataTraveler. What, it takes 2 1/2 hours just to read the whole thing and way more to write it?! Kingston must have used a stack of flash chips and one advantage this would allow is to use multichannel architecture. They probably used a dual channel architecture (not the best) but it's simply inadequate. It's like having a DVD but only being able to read it at CD data transfer speeds.
It has some uses but far from perfect.
Close but no cigar!
About 6 months. Then USB 3 comes out...
Is anyone going to spend £600 on a ageing USB2 device at this late stage in its life?
Then I'd be open to considering it!