Kingston DataTraveler Mini Slim 16 GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive DTMS/16GB (Black)

The product arrived quick, but I wanted it in black. That is what the ad said. That is the color that was shown. I talked to Tiger Direct. They apologized as it only came in light blue.Otherwise the Unit works fine.

I was looking for a cheap USB drive for work, and the DataTraveler Mini was the cheapest 16gb I could get.A few things:1) It's really tiny, and you need to put this on a keychain or lanyard. And remember, black side with the contacts faces up.2) The drive isn't that fast. Admittedly, I wasn't benching it with a stopwatch, but it's noticeably slower than another Kingston drive I have - but still good enough to put data on.3) I wish it had a cap or something to protect the contacts so I'm not worried about eventual wear and tear or an accidental drop killing the drive.The drive deserves 3.5 stars, so I rounded up. It'll be fine to hold a lot of data on it and you won't notice it at all, but it's not the speediest of drives. The price point for the drive is awesome, and worth buying it for.

Ok, is this the fastest USB key there is? Not even close.Is it the most durable USB key there is? Not even close.BUT there is at least one specific application for which these things are absolutely brilliant!If you have a later model Ford product (such as the Escape) that has the Ford Microsoft SYNC system, and you have the USB port on the dash to plug in an iPod or USB device, and you don't want to risk carrying around your iPod or other music player in the car due to fear from theft, having to unplug it to hide it every time you stop, etc...Then this is the RIGHT product for you.This thing is tiny. Fill it up with your music (I got 2300 songs converted from CD to 190k VBS MP3 format on it) and plug it into your USB port on in the car.Sync yourself to the USB input. It will do a short, quick index, and you are ready to go!The SYNC can find any of my 2300 songs in less than a second.It is so small, it almost disappears into the dash. You can barely tell it's there. Get one to match your color (black in my case). Fill it with music, plug it in, and then forget about it.Who cares that 6 disc cd changers have fallen out of favor these days. This holds the equivalent of hundreds of CD's :)This is far better than having your iPod sitting there, just begging for someone to bust out the window to steal it. Odds are, they will never even see thing thing plugged into the dash.

I really liked the drive, but after about 6 months, the case fell apart at the contacts exposing the circuit board and components, and the drive would not read any of my data, most of which was not backed up ... silly me ! Kingston offered to replace the drive, but sent me to a data recovery company that offered to retrieve the data .... for $1800.00! Yes, that was One Thousand Eight Hundred Dollars. upon close inspection, the cross section of the material that broke was less than 1/2 square mm or less than 1/1000th of a square inch of plastic to render it completely useless. Way too flimsey to keep that much data

This USB drive is incredibly small and seems to be very tough - nearly indestructible, in fact. It's so tiny I keep it on my keychain, and don't even notice that it's there.Unfortunately, the write speed to this flash drive is incredibly slow. As in 2 to 3MB per second. My USB harddrives all run at 10 times that speed. It does read faster than it writes, however. So if you're the kind of person who puts stuff on a flash drive and leaves it there for a long time, then the write speed isn't really a big deal. But my main reason for having 16GB of space is so that I can move large files around - so the slow write speed makes it almost unusable for my intended purpose. Nonetheless, I'll probably keep it around for stuff that isn't so temporary.******Update 3-Feb-09: I've discovered that, while this drive is a bit slow, the problem is noticeably worse on a MacBook Pro than on a Dell Latitude D630. Both of the machines I tested have comparable processors, RAM, etc. On my MacBook, it took 2:20 (two minutes, twenty seconds) to write 455MB of digital photos, while it took 1:05 to write the same files to the same flash drive on the Latitude. I reformatted the drive to Apple format, and it sped up somewhat - taking 1:50 to write the files. But it was still slower than the Latitude. So this flash drive is apparently better with a Windows machine.

No problems except... it could come with a small plastic case for protection while not in use.