We never thought a humble thumb drive would be worthy of a second look – or a First Look, for that matter – but Kingston has proven us wrong. The company’s DataTraveler 300 USB flash drive recently become the world’s highest capacity thumb drive by offering a stunning 256GB of storage.
You read right: 256GB. The same capacity your laptop hard drive probably had in 2005. Or 2008, for that matter. And with write speeds of 20 MB/s and read speeds of 10 MB/s, it’s nothing short of a solid-state hard drive on a stick.
Of course, at 2.78 inches long, 0.67 inches wide, and 0.87 deep, it’s a bit chunkier than your usual tab-sized thumb drive, but the capless design does allow the USB connector to retract inside when not in use to bring it down a notch in size. And it includes Kingston’s Password Traveler security software to protect all 256GB of whatever you’ve decided to store: 51,000 images, 54 DVDs or 365 CDs, and Kingston likes to break it down.
The company imagines netbook users snapping up DataTravelers to extend the capacity of their storage-strapped machines, but with a price tag that translates to $924 USD – about twice the price of most netbooks – we’re a little dubious. They’re on sale immediately, but must be built to order, and are currently only selling in the UK. Find out more at Kingston.
