Not Worth Any Money
Pros:
Colour-coding, capacity
Cons:
Fragile, not reliable
The Bottom Line:
Fragile, floozy, undependable. You don't want that in a drive.
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Overall Rating:
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Author's Review
We bought ours on eBay, and the price was good. We also thought the bright colour would be helpful finding some things in a sea of little black sticks.
At this moment, it's rather like the days when the only floppies you could get were black, and then someone realized coloured plastic was nearly as cheap. They made bundles because we could then colour-code to find information faster. Something like that needs to be done with thumbdrives. We have a business card box full and sorting out which has the classical music and which has the Epinion reviews and which web page projects are where gets tiresome, as the only way to do it is to read them. Thumb drives in general need a labelling system.
My husband used this one for a couple of weeks and found that putting it in the USB port didn't always mean it came up. Sometimes it wouldn't and he had to insert, pull, and try again until on the second or third try it would come up. He was not happy with that, but figured it was a tolerance thing.
Then it did exactly what my 4 GB version had done the second day I had it--the jack broke loose, so that any pressure to try and insert it into a port meant it just withdrew into the plastic body.
Well, once something's broken you might as well try fixing it to recover your data. I mean, the worst that will happen is you'll break it some more. As with my 4 GB, we pulled out the jack and run some AAC adhesive (that's superglue to most of you) around the point where it enters the plastic body. We let this set up overnight and, fortunately, it worked. Its dislocation hadn't disconnected it. Yes, it was tough enough to survive and not lose data, but flash drives are by their nature: they have no moving parts.
Now, of course, after that surgery we hardly expect it to be reliable. If someone gave us more of these, we would AAC them right out of the package.
If no one makes us a present of them, I don't think any more Kingston drives are coming into our house. I don't want to go through this again. As it is, they're only good for data transfer, not storage. Three weeks after the repair, this one has electronically burnt out. Yes, undoubtedly from being damaged, but it shouldn't have given way under a few normal usages in the first place.
Thank you, I'll buy Memorex.