KINGSTON DT100 4GB FLASH DRIVE 4GB DATA TRAVELER U
by Kingston
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Category: CE See more product details |
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Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of KINGSTON DT100 4GB FLASH DRIVE 4GB DATA TRAVELER U
Customer Review: Good Budget Drive
Summary: 4 Stars
I bought this drive because it was on sale from Circuit City and was very reasonably priced for the storage size (4GB). It is my first thumb drive. It is extremely compact and very very light. The build quality seems decent, but not extraordinary. The thumb slider works well, and it is nice not to have to worry about losing a cap for the USB drive.
One thing to keep in mind is that this is not the fastest drive in the world. It took a good while to transfer 2GB of files onto the drive. While this is not an issue for my purposes, you might want to keep this in mind if you are intending to use the drive to transfer large amounts of data back and forth. For me, I just want a back up of many files and be able to pull them off the drive when I need to and the drive works very well for that.
The price storage ratio really can't be beat - 4GB - which would have cost a king's ransom before, is now rather affordable with this drive.
In operation, the drive was very easy to use. Just plug it in and it works. Drive packaging says Vista compatible, and it comes from Kingston which makes a generally good product.
If you just need a reasonably priced drive to store files and be very light so that you don't notice it, then this is the drive for you.
As an update to this review, I've now used the drive on several different computers and it has worked flawlessly on each. It is also much much faster than it was the first time I used it. This leads me to believe that the problem was with the network from which I was copying files and had nothing to do with this drive. Thus, I would probably increase my review to 4 1/2 stars, with a 5 stars to be given if it had a metal casing. The plastic casings on all of these drives seems a little flimsy. Otherwise, an excellent drive.
Customer Review: Good for the price
Summary: 3 Stars
I bought this drive nearly two years ago because it was very reasonably priced at Fry's Electronics. The Kingston DataTraveler brand is one of the cheaper USB flash drives that are capless. However, there are some major design flaws that kept me from using the DataTraveler for as long as I would have liked.
PROS:
- Capless design, you don't need to worry about losing any parts.
- The bar that secures it to a lanyard or keychain is well made, it won't break any time (I lost a capless Sandisk Cruzer Micro because it broke off the keychain).
- It's one of the lightest USB flash drives I've handled.
- It's fast and compatible across platforms.
- Plug and play ready.
- Relatively inexpensive.
CONS:
- Although light, its body is NOT durable. Within the first few months that I bought it, the body case was coming loose at the seams. I had to put masking tape around it to keep it from splitting. Ultimately, the flash drive portion that came out of the body bent and it had difficulty connecting to a USB port, often resetting, causing me to replace it after 1 year and 10 months of use.
- The switch that extends the USB flash drive is tough to slide. It's easy to break a nail if you aren't careful.
- The bar that's meant to attach to a lanyard is very small, so don't expect to get a keychain or carabiner through it. I did it by keeping the string from a broken cell phone charm and threading that through, then attaching it to a keychain loop.
Due to the lack of durability, my overall rating dropped to 3 stars. However, if you are on a budget, this is still a good bargain.
Customer Review: Decent speed, but not ReadyBoost-compatible
Summary: 3 Stars
I like Kingston products. They are general of high quality. This 8GB Data Traveler 100 is no exception. It provides solid performance and seems well built. Please note, though, that this drive is not compatible with Windows Vista's ReadyBoost feature -- it says so on the packaging. This means it does not meet the read/write speed requirements of ReadyBoost. But in everyday file copying, it seems pretty fast.
The drive comes formatted in FAT32. If you share this across different OSes -- including Windows 98 or earlier, Mac OS, Linux, etc. -- you might want to leave it at FAT32. If you use Windows 2000, Windows XP or Windows Vista exclusively, you may want to convert it to the NTFS format for better performance, as well as for the ability to store files bigger than 2GB. (FAT32 cannot store files bigger than 2GB.)
To convert the drive safely (without losing any existing information already stored on it), follow these steps:
1. Open My Computer and find the drive letter assigned to the USB drive. You'll find the drive with the generic volume name "KINGSTON".
2. Go to Start -> Run, then type "cmd" (without quotes) to open the DOS window.
3. At the DOS prompt, type "convert F: /fs:ntfs" (again, without quotes) -- here I assume your Kingston drive is the F drive -- to convert the flash drive safely, without losing any information. This should take less than a minute.
Note: NTFS does not make your drive faster per se, but provides better behind-the-scenes file management and its biggest benefit is allowing >2GB files.
Customer Review: Decent speed, but not ReadyBoost-compatible
Summary: 3 Stars
I like Kingston products. They are general of high quality. This 8GB Data Traveler 100 is no exception. It provides solid performance and seems well built. Please note, though, that this drive is not compatible with Windows Vista's ReadyBoost feature -- it says so on the packaging. This means it does not meet the read/write speed requirements of ReadyBoost. But in everyday file copying, it seems pretty fast.
The drive comes formatted in FAT32. If you share this across different OSes -- including Windows 98 or earlier, Mac OS, Linux, etc. -- you might want to leave it at FAT32. If you use Windows 2000, Windows XP or Windows Vista exclusively, you may want to convert it to the NTFS format for better performance, as well as for the ability to store files bigger than 2GB. (FAT32 cannot store files bigger than 2GB.)
To convert the drive safely (without losing any existing information already stored on it), follow these steps:
1. Open My Computer and find the drive letter assigned to the USB drive. You'll find the drive with the generic volume name "KINGSTON".
2. Go to Start -> Run, then type "cmd" (without quotes) to open the DOS window.
3. At the DOS prompt, type "convert F: /fs:ntfs" (again, without quotes) -- here I assume your Kingston drive is the F drive -- to convert the flash drive safely, without losing any information. This should take less than a minute.
Note: NTFS does not make your drive faster per se, but provides better behind-the-scenes file management and its biggest benefit is allowing >2GB files.
Customer Review: Working Fine
Summary: 5 Stars
I recently bought two of the Kingston flash drives, one 2 GB and one 4 GB. We are using them on graphics files and they have both worked as advertised. The only minor difficulty has been inserting them into the USB ports. They have to be precisely lined up to do properly insert the drive; that is just a characteristic of the USB port I suppose but requires some careful attention. I've also noticed that holding the thumb slider on the side of the drive that extends the plug is somewhat tricky. It keeps wanting to slide back into the drive housing.
Once installed it does work well. The window showing the drive contents is automatically displayed on the screen. You may want to check my comments on the other drive about assigning drive letters if you are having any problems with the Kingston drive window automatically displaying.
Both the 2 GB and the 4 GB have prodigious capacity. Remembering vividly the limitations of the 1.44 MB floppy and the 700 MB capacity of the CD-R one can get spoiled quickly by this level of storage capacity.