Kingston Data Traveler Secure 4GB Flash Drive Review

A carefully designed flash drive for professionals & the folks at Los Alamos. It should be, given its sky-high price.

As you might imagine, this adds some weight to the DataTraveler Secure 4GB, making it the heaviest flash drive I've tested, even more so than the Cruzer Titanium that I ran over with my old 92' Accord. Don't get me wrong, it's not burdensome to carry, it's just reassuringly heavier. To get a feel for its durability, I did the standard tests of kicking it around a parking lot and running it over it with my car (more on that test later).

While the drive itself survived the kick-around-the-lot testing without so much as a scratch, the bumpers did get somewhat scuffed, and each time it was hurled across the air, the cap flew, yes flew in a random direction - it's not held on tight enough, it just snaps into place by two plastic dimples. Of course, it helps if the flash drive is attached to your person, which is why Kingston included a small nylon loop with a metal ring for attaching to key chains and lanyards. Personally, I prefer the short cord over a lanyard, because I have the terrible tendency at work of driving off with my drive still plugged into the client's system. This way I won't get any farther than the parking lot before I realize my mistake.

It should also be noted that the DataTraveler Secure is IEC 60529 IPX8 compliant, or in plain English it's waterproof up to 4 feet. To test this, I let it spend five minutes in the 4 foot zone of my apartment complex's swimming pool, after which I immediately dried off the USB connector and convinced my roommate to plug it into his laptop. Worked like a charm.

Protecting the Data
When plugging in the drive, you'll find its contents to be rather Spartan. There's no obtrusive U3 or trialware apps bundled to muck up your experience. Rather, there's two small executables - MyDatazone.exe and MyTraveler.exe. MyDataZone is what you'll be using most often, as it is the key to unlocking the encrypted partition. Upon launching it for the first time, you'll be asked to format the drive (so quickly back up the other application so you don't have to download it from Kingston's website like I did), select an encrypted partition size, and enter a password and optional password hint. Once formatted, you'll be able to mount the encrypted partition by logging in.

There are a few nice bonuses to how Kingston implemented this feature. First, the firmware only shows the encrypted partition to Windows after logging in, so it's not always there for someone to hack away at. Second, brute forcers trying their hand at your password will find their attempts thwarted if you have a non-guessable password, as the DataTraveler allows only 10 non-contiguous attempts before permanently locking the partition, requiring a format. A warning is given to the user when three or fewer attempts remain.

The only real downsides to this firmware method of encrypting your data is that it dismounts your non-encrypted partition so long as you're logged into the encrypted partition, and there's no way to access data on both at the same time. Also, the locked partition cannot be accessed from a Mac, Linux, or pre Win2K computer. Thankfully, this firmware trick does not require administrative privileges in order to run, as the encrypted partition may be accessed from any limited user account in Windows 2000/XP.

Attacking My Patience
The second application, MyTraveler.exe is 90% useless to me. Upon launching it, I found out it's an installer, where the only options given are if you want to make a desktop shortcut, and cancel or finish. No description is given beforehand as to what this mysterious application does. Well, to my annoyance, it does very little, apart from automatically planting itself in the startup items, taking space in the system tray, and showing popups whenever I plug in the DataTraveler. These can all optionally be turned off, but for something that just installs without much description, it almost felt as if I reinstalled AOL Instant Messenger and all of its nuisances.

Once launched, a hideable panel appears on top of all windows giving you options to assign a nickname to your 4GB flash drive, open the drive, eject it, and login to the privacy zone (same as MyDataZone.exe) - all of which can be done in Windows anyhow. The only new features here are the ability to write-protect the entire 4GB drive, and synchronize the My Documents and My Favorites folders as well as any custom folder of your own choosing, although you can't use this feature easily with multiple folders. The reason for this is because it remembers the last location and before giving you the option to synchronize another folder, it will rescan the last set which takes a while depending on the size of the previous folder. Needless to say, this "feature" was quickly uninstalled.

SiSoftware Sandra Benchmark (Normal Partition)

SiSoftware Sandra Benchmark (256-bit AES Partition)

This is wonderful, not only are the raw read and write speeds pretty darn good, but the fact that the hardware encrypted partition barely suffers a performance hit is just fantastic. To contrast with the software-encrypted Lexar JumpDrive Secure II, although compatible with Macs, it requires Administrator privileges to run and suffers a 37% performance drop when encrypting.

Crunch Time... (This is just for Fun)
I figured it'd be interesting to see how well the "titanium coated stainless steel casings" held up in an extreme environment, namely, withstanding the crushing force of my new Honda Element with a curb weight of over 3500 pounds. Now remember, this is waaay beyond life's usual mishaps and is NOT something that Kingston advertises as possible (though they do quote a review claiming it?s built like a tank), but I figured it'd be entertaining.

As you can see, the DataTraveler Secure is nowhere near as forgiving as the Cruzer Titanium, crunching with the first run (granted I ran over the Cruzer with an older Accord.) The reason for this is the steel housing is only about a millimeter thick, acting as body armor to the vulnerable plastic innards. After I straightened out the bent USB connector and plugged it back into my computer, I was able to see evidence of the DiskOnKey being detected, although it could not mount the filesystem.

Recap
Overall I'm quite impressed with Kingston's Data Traveler Secure 4GB flash drive. 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.

By Scott Clark, Consumer Technology Editor