Next stop 64 GB Kingston USB Flash

Remember when we told you that Kingston was releasing a 32 GB USB pen drive? Well those days are long gone, or so Kingston would like us to think for they have just launched the 64 GB version in the same lineup, the DT 150 series. Now 32 GB was according to us almost as big as some hard disk drives but 64 GB is as big as many hard disk drives, especially HDDs located in laptops.

The Kingston DT150 is huge (in capacity that is, same physical size as the 32 GB drive as shown in the image below), but there are certain compromises to achieve that capacity. Its read speeds are around approximately 30 MB/s but the write speeds are around 8 MB/s. To give you an idea of how slow that is, Windows Vista does not even support ReadyBoost on this thing.

The other problem some people might face is that the USB drive is formatted to FAT32. This means that you cannot have files larger than 4 GB in size. To try formatting it through Windows Explorer is an exercise in futility, it simply does not allow you to format in NTFS. You can however do it through disk management in the computer management console. A quick and easy way to get to this is by right-clicking ‘My Computer’ and then selecting ‘Manage’ from the menu. However, we think that few people would be familiar with this technique.
The pricing is about $170 in retail and somewhat less on Amazon (about $120ish is the price). So to conclude, we find that the 64 GB DT150 is value for money. The speed is a bit of an annoyance but to rectify that we reckon we will have to wait for USB 3.0 specs to be introduced and used. And that might be awhile yet.