Oh! Gizmo

By Ian Chiu

Thumbdrives… we’ve seen them all. While they are all made to sell like hotcakes, not exactly every one of them is designed for serious data protection. Bring in the Kingston’s DataTraveler Secure – the first flash drive to combine both a weatherproof and a hack-proof feature. Sounds like a winner? It indeed is. The Kingston has an embedded RISC processor that can encrypt data on-the-fly in 256-bit AES. The software can also self-destruct the data after 10 non-contiguous attempts of entering the wrong password. (This solution just won’t work.) The Kingston, in addition, is IEC 60529 IPX8 compliant, meaning waterproof up to 4ft in plain English.

Overall I’m quite impressed with Kingston’s Data Traveler Secure. It’s highly durable outside of being crushed by an SUV, doesn’t require drying for hours after an accidental couple of minutes in the pool, it’s speedy, self-destructs, and doesn’t suffer any performance hits when encrypting files. The only two quarrels I have are the annoying and almost useless MyTraveler synchronization program and the lack of Mac and Linux access to the encrypted partition, although the majority of the DataTraveler Secure’s market is Windows users anyhow. Highly recommended.

[Kingston Data Traveler Secure 4GB Review @ Everything USB]