Kingston DataTraveler 101 Gen 2 16GB USB Drive – Black

S. Poppitt

at 12:32 pm

The first thing which struck me about this very nice looking flash drive is how tiny it actually is, far smaller than I’d expected, at only about an inch long (or roughly one-third the size of my old 8GB ByteStor drive).

Although advertised as a 16 GB device, once formatted (it comes pre-formatted as FAT32) it provides less than 15 GB of storage. 92MB of this is taken up by the Windows XP “ur drive” software (useless to me, running Windows 9x). Some users have reportedly had difficulty removing this, to reclaim the wasted space; but in Windows ME it deleted without any problem. I didn’t even need to use the Uninstall utility which comes with it.

This USB device is not compatible with Windows 98 or 98SE, as it doesn’t include a Windows 98 driver file (although it *might* work using one of the “generic” mass storage drivers for Windows 98 available on-line, but I haven’t tested this as I’m using Windows ME).

However, it works okay in Windows ME (which has its own built-in mass storage drivers for USB flash storage devices), and in Windows XP. In fact it worked straight from the box in Windows ME; Windows detected it at boot up, and installed a mass storage driver for it.

It’s backwards-compatible, in that it will function in a USB 1.1 port (at USB 1.1 speed), as well as in a USB 2.0 port as advertised (where it will work at the faster USB 2.0 speed), though you might not want to use such a large drive in a USB 1.1 port except in an emergency, as USB 1.1 gives very slow data transfer speeds.

In USB 2.0 its access speed is good. At best I was seeing a 21 MB file written to the drive in about 2 seconds, though larger files were slower. A 35 MB file could take up to 10 seconds. The packaging includes notes pointing out that speed will depend partly on what else the computer is doing, and how it’s configured. It took me about an hour to transfer 250 files totalling 10 GB onto the device, a speed I was quite happy with, at this price. Read speeds were about twice as fast as write speeds.

You can buy faster devices, but they cost nearly twice as much. And as a home user, I’ll only occasionally have to load large amounts of files onto the device, so I think this is a real bargain.

Rating: 5 / 5