In Use (continued):

When you first connect the DataTraveler Locker+ to a system you get one new drive letter that identifies the device as a CD drive. This is the partition where the software is installed. Once you complete the steps to activate the drive, or when you access it at any later time, you then also get a second drive letter which is your secure, encrypted storage partition. As shown in the image below the system is using letters E and F for the single Kingston flash drive.



One feature of this drive is that if the password is entered incorrectly 10 times in a row, the drive will format itself and allow the user to rest the password. In order to test this I simply entered the wrong password several times and lost track of how many botched entries I had made. Luckily, when you are down to three chances the software lets you know with the screen shown below.



I made ten "illegal" password entry attempts and as promised that was it for my data and previous password. I was given the following warning and when it was all said and done my data was gone and I had to pick a new password.



While the drive worked as expected on Windows XP, Vista, and 7 systems, I tested it elsewhere with less success. It did not work on a Xandros Linux system, or on a couple of media center devices. I was curious to see if something like a Western Digital WD TV or Seagate FreeAgent Theater+ would be able to access media files from the drive, and neither even acknowledged that a drive was attached.

Testing:

While the drive performed very well handling day-to-day tasks, I had it in the back of my head from the very start of the review that the encryption had to be a hindrance to overall performance. In order to get a sense of what sort of read/write data transfer rates could be achieved, I ran a session of CrystalDiskMark 2.2 on a Windows 7 Pro system running an Intel Core i7-920 quad-core processor, a Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD3R X58 motherboard, 6GB of G.Skill 1600MHz triple channel memory, and a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 750GB hard drive.

The screenshot below captures everything CrystalDiskMark had to say about the Kingston's 16GB DataTraveler Locker+ flash drive.



I have to admit that I was pleasantly surprised. The read performance maxed out at just over 32MB/s, which is quite respectable for any flash drive, and it seemed my assumptions about the encryption were off the mark. While the write performance wasn't the best I have seen, 14.55 MB/s is very good. I think of all the flash drives I own, the fastest maxes out at just over 18 MB/s, so the difference isn't all that significant.