USB capacity wars are raging hot. Now memory giant Kingston has upped the ante, introducing the 8 GB Data Traveler secure privacy Edition. The drive is dark gray with black rubber piping for grip; it will weather dusty Indian condition with ease. The cap fits snugly-no surprise, since the drive is supposed to be waterproof up to a depth of 4 meters. It comes with a detachable mii lanyard (the threaded string) to be fastened to a key-ring , but Kingston does not provide a key-ring or anchor.
This is essentially a high speed Flash drive for the extremely security conscious; this is evident when you plug it in for the first time. You are greeted with a screen where you set a username, password, and password reminder, and password reminder hint.
Kingston seems to be little too paranoid here: only after setting a very “strong” (as in complex) password can you access the drive.
The DataTraveler supports 256-bit AES encryption on the fly, that is, data is encrypted as it is being transferred to the drive. Considering this, the drive is quite speedy in its class of drives. When we tested it, it took just 57 seconds to write a 700 MB sequential file to the drive, and a much lower 30 seconds to read the same file form the drive. Assorted files of the same capacity take much longer, though: over 2:30 minutes to write to the drive while rwading them takes 1:15 minutes. You’ll find Windows’ vista ReadyBoost feature supported; this lets the OS use the drive as cache or virtual memory to enhance system performance.
In case you’re toally taken in by the 8 GB figure, bear in mind that the drive only supports FAT32, thereby limiting the maximum individual fily size to 4 GB. This means you can’t carry around files such as DVD images, which are generally larger.
price? A premium Rs 12,000. We’d suggest waiting for a few months; it is probably too early to buy this one.

Specifications :

• Capacity: 8 GB
• Interface: USB 2.0
• Password Protection: Lanyard

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