14 DAY TRIAL // Flash drives with high security capabilities are the rave right now, as they seem to become every other quarter. Not surprising, considering that the standard feature set does not lend itself to much variety across storage device makers.
Just yesterday, we wrote about the fairly peculiar Toshiba flash drive with built-in keypad, allowing you to input passwords by hand even before you connect it to a PC's USB port.
Now, Kingston has released a pair of encrypted flash drives as well, which lack the keypad but are otherwise as close to security overkill as anything could get.
The flash drives are called DataTraveler 4000 Gen. 2 and DataTraveler 4000 Gen. 2 Management Ready.
The basic specifications
The DataTraveler 4000 Gen. 2 and DataTraveler 4000 Gen. 2 Management Ready are quite similar, save for the fact that the latter boasts optional SafeConsole management from BlockMaster.
SafeConsole provides organizations with tools that configure passwords, reset them, configure device policies, activate audits, etc., but we are getting ahead of ourselves.
Storage-wise, the newcomer can have up to 64 GB. That means that the full list is thus: 4 GB, 8 GB, 16 GB, 32 GB, and 64 GB.
All of them use USB 3.0 technology for communication, which allows for transfer speeds of up to 250 MB/s when reading and 85 MB/s when writing.
These speeds depend on the capacity of the drives, so the 64 GB units will be a lot faster than the others, especially the 4 GB and 8 GB ones.
All the while, the new flash drive units constantly encrypt data via hardware-based, 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) in XTS mode. A password protection is included, with drive lock and reformat after 10 failures of input. No integrated keypad though, as we said.
Security is high even physically, with the stainless steel case being coated in titanium for good measure. This, incidentally, protects from water, though you should still avoid dropping the thing in a bathtub or a river, especially if the cap is off.
Altogether, the Kingston DataTraveler 4000 Gen. 2 and DataTraveler 4000 Gen. 2 Management Ready flash drives measure 77.9 x 22 x 12.05 mm / 3 x 0.9 x 0.47 inches.
Availability and pricing
The newcomers have not been priced in the press release, but they should be up for order to businesses, backed by five-year warranty and free technical support.
