Kingston 16GB USB 2.0 Data Traveler Thumbdrive Review
It seems that thumb drives, like the Kingston 16GB USB 2.0 Data Traveler Thumbdrive, are becoming even more affordable and available with even larger capacities. As I had asked in an earlier review, should you buy now or hold out for even more capacity? My answer so far has been keep buying good deals and keep upgrading.
Review Continued Below…
Let’s look at some of the specs for the Kingston 16GB USB 2.0 Data Traveler Thumbdrive. The whopping 16GB of storage space means that you can carry around 3 DVD’s worth of data in your pocket with room to spare. It will work with all of the major operating systems, Windows, including Vista, Mac and Linux. All in all, it’s just your good, solid, basic USB 2.0 thumb drive.
Like it’s 8GB cousin I reviewed earlier the Kingston 16GB Data Traveler is lightweight and small. This is good and bad, good that it’s so small you won’t notice carrying it but it’s easy to lose or send through the washer. It also has a retractable USB connector, which is also good and bad. The good is that there are no more caps to loose. The bad is that the USB port, although retracted, is exposed to dirt and pocket lint. I’ve also found that in use that the retractable connector doesn’t lock well when extended so you have to make sure you have a good connection.
Another minor downside is the lack of support for Vista ReadyBoost although, in practice, I’ve found this to be minor. Also, as I mentioned in my 8GB Data Traveler review, that you can improve performance by using Windows NTFS formatting instead of the cross-platform FAT32 formatting to improve performance on Windows systems while losing compatibility with other platforms.
A nice plus of the Kingston 16GB USB 2.0 Data Traveler Thumbdrive is that they keep the bonus software to a minimum. With our hard drives today being increasingly clogged up with junkware, this is a nice change.
If you’re like me you’ve been constantly upgrading as thumb drive memory size increases and prices decrease. Like me, you may have every size of thumb drive from 128MB up to 8GB. Is it time for you to upgrade to 16GB or should you wait for 32GB or more? As for me, I’m continuing the progression with a Kingston 16GB USB 2.0 Data Traveler Thumbdrive.
16 gb for only $0.49, and it is a 2.0 usb, cool
it is getting smaller, it is getting cheaper, it is getting reliable 
I was pricing USB’s versus SD cards for my new mini notebook and found that a 32GB SD card was around A$35 but to get a USB of the same size was more than 3 times that much. USB’s are cute and portable but they are not the cheapest option for cards.
Lissie
16gb is amazing. You can get so many different kinds of usb drives too now. I have seen crispy bacon, biscuits, pens,hearts, wooden, footballs, golf balls,credit cards and even hand bag usbs.
i’ve been using different brands usb’s but among all of them , i have found kingston the best of all. It is reliable and dependable and also the prices are very comparitive.
Harris Miller.
I hate the retractable USB part. I’ve ruined more than one thumbdrive that way. I need a cap! Somebody needs to make one where the exposed end automatically covers up when it retracts. Seriously. No more exposed USB ends.
I totally agree with you. I mean how hard can it be for someone to design an automatic cover. At least this will keep some of the dust out. I’m sure that there’s some genius out there who has designed a shock/fire/water proof pendrive. I mean what do the military/firemen/water enthuisasts use when they need to get the job done?
I can’t believe how big these things have gotten. And so cheap! I think I’m gonna finally bite the bullet now!
I bought one and it has given me nothing but trouble. I an a Windows XP SP3 user and the drive just does not work. I took it back to the place I bought it, Futureshop, thinking it was just a bad drive. However, the next one did not work, either. It will give a delayed write error, or “Cannot Find File” error when trying to copy things. Sometimes it works and a single file is copied over, but that is rare.
It is a waste of money, do not purchase this hunk of crap.
That being said, my previous Kingston 4gb drive was excellent. I do not know what went wrong with this model, but do not purchase it.
Hi. I’m having the same problem…did you resolve in someway? I bought it only 2 weeks ago. I don’t want to buy an other one.
Thanks
Bye
Alberto
Thanks for the info Adam,
I haven’t had any trouble myself but I’ve heard other people having trouble with USB drives of 16GB or greater and not just Kingston.
Did you try reformatting your USB drive? A few years ago I had a 512MB drive that acted up until I did this. Something had corrupted the file system on the drive I suppose.
The 16 Gb Kingston datatraveler is faulty were it has to write files bigger than 3.9 Gb’s, it just wont do it and returns messages like disk full or delayed write error.
After some contacts with personel working with the company, it turns out that Kingston was aware of this fact, but failt to do something about it abd started selling the stick anyway!!!!
you need to make sure you format the drive with ntfs as fat maximum file size is 4gig
Avoid it like the plague, there seems to be a problem with this product as it went corrup on me and I lost a considerable amount of data because of this.
scan.co.uk has listed it as a poor product
Consider yourself warned.