Kingston’s DataTraveler Secure is billed as an “enterprise-grade” flash drive. Translated for civvies, that means 256-bit AES hardware encryption, an IPX8 waterproof rating, and a titanium shell. Oh yeah, and optimization for small files. While almost every key we’ve tested in the last few months choked on the 10,000 Word docs we feed them during testing, the DataTraveler Secure was able to write that onslaught of files in three minutes instead of the usual 20 minutes.

That’s a huge difference, and for someone who needs to grab 500MB of small Office files off the server at the end of the day, it’s well worth the extra bucks Kingston charges. And we do mean extra. Based on street pricing and formatted capacity, the Kingston key costs you around $61 per gig compared to $21 for Corsair’s drive. Even the SanDisk Cruzer that we looked at in November is cheap by comparison.

Still, that’s the price you pay for small-file performance. In other words, it’s a drive that’s not only good at writing AVI files but also DOC files. And for the office drone, that’s probably money well spent.
-Gordon Mah Ung

Month Reviewed: January 2007
+ USB: Fastest key for small-file writes that we've ever tested.
- PS/2: The chunky design and Beverly Hills pricing makes this a tough key to swallow.
Verdict: 9 - KickAss

URL: www.kingston.com

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