Kingston USB thumb drive - Privacy Edition

Kingston. Brand known for Memory. Beside Memory, Kingston also produce a lot of things, one of the item that they have is a USB Thumb Drive.

Almost all of us have already seen a thumb drive. the price range from US$20++ Up to US$ 300 depending on the size. I have seen a 512 MB thumb drive cost only 19.99 USD. so the price is a lot of different compared to 2004. :). I bought mine 256MB about US$80.

Oh well thats electronics world, When the new version came out, the price will be slashed to make a road for the new Product.


So what is so special about this USB Drive? This is different with a normal thumb drive since it allows you to put
1. Encryption / Password
2. Self Destruct / Privacy --> Deleted the data, not really "blow up" :) I wish it would though.

Encryption itself is nothing new, most of the common USB drive have this feature, the interesting part is the "self destruct" functionality.

If you enter the password WRONGLY for 25 times, oops, your data will be "deleted". Oopsss..

You might be wondering why do you want to buy this thing then, especially people tend to forget the password :).

Okay this is a good feature if you want to store a sensitive information i.e. Salary Information, Social Security Number, Personal photos (What kind of photos ? :P ).

Definitely you do not want these kind of data to falls to the wrong hand, otherwise you will be in trouble so for that reason, this device is very useful for corporate or paranoid people :).

This Thumb drive is already available now and comes with different size depending on your wallet :)
DTEP/256 - US $48
DTEP/512 - US $75
DTEP/1GB - US$119
DTEP/2GB - US$222
DTEP/4GB - US$347 --> Expensive :P


Pro:
1. Self Destruct ability
2. Hardware based. So its more difficult to cheat the system

Cons:
1. 25 times sounds very little, I would prefer that I can set the number myself, oh well nothing is free :).
2. Cost more than the normal USB Drive

Unknown:
1. Is there any counter that will show in the screen, number of password remaining before its automatically deleted?



PS: I have not try this device myself, so I will assume after the data will be deleted, you can still use the thumb drive, but most probably youwill need to set the password again. But will update this blog once I get more information :).

More info: http://www.kingston.com/press/2006/flash/03a.asp


cya.