Daily Archives: June 8, 2012

Jun 08

Kingston DataTraveler 109 review thumb-down

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First of all, if you are looking for buying a USB drive, then stay away from Kingston’s DataTraveler 109 model. Don’t be fooled by its compact, simple, and light-weight design as I was. As you can see from the picture below of this model, it really looks like a good drive and will not take much space on your key chain.

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However, the problem is that the USB drive is made of two plastic pieces and as a result, it is very weak. I bought one of this model about 6 months ago and put it on my key chain, but now the drive became this:

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Fortunately, the USB drive is still under the one year warranty. After contacting the Kingston support department, they are gracious enough to agree to replace my broken USB drive with a more solid one: Kingston DataTraveler SE9:

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Yes, it is the same dimension of the broken one, but is made of one solid piece of metal. I have been using it for several days, and I highly recommend it.

Jun 08

What is urDrive and V-Drive?

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I bought a Kingston USB drive the other day and it is preloaded with some software called urDrive. I was curious about it because I never heard of it, so I did some research. After some digging, I found out that urDrive is preloaded software on select Kingston USB flash drives. It is bundled with computer scan by Norton PC Cleanup, web browser by Maxthon, kid’s games by Fooz Kids, and interestingly, a free cloud storage of 6GB. At first, I thought Kingston is the provider of the free on-line storage, but after some investigation, I realized that the free 6GB cloud storage is provided by Maxthon’s V-drive.

V-drive is Maxthon’s file syncing service that runs on Windows PC (desktop or USB drive) and Android. However, comparing to some major file sync/cloud service providers such as SugarSync, DropBox, SpiderOak, and Box.net, I don’t see any feature that will make V-drive stand out. The only interesting feature is it can be installed on a USB drive and launched from the USB drive, but it is not enough to convince me to use the service. I have been using SugarSync for over a year and I am very happy with the service. If you are interested to know why I like SugarSync, you can read my previous posts about why I dropped DropBox and switched to SugarSync and what the features I enjoy in SugarSync.

Those two posts have my referral link, and if you sign up an account with SugarSync with the link, you will get a bonus 500MB space and I will get a bonus too. Thank you in advance.