Kingston DataTraveler microDuo 16GB USB2.0 Flash Drive Review

news · March 31, 2014

In many of my flash drive reviews I have mentioned that USB flash

drives are so common these days that they are literally being given

away to us and it is only once we move above the 16GB marker and over

to USB3.0 compatible drives that we start to see the price rise up

along with the performance. The basic recipe for a flash drive has

barely changed Ã¢Â€Â“ if at all in many years and this is simply a USB

plug mounted on to a small PCB with a controller and some flash

storage on the other end. Apart from the advances in performance,

capacity and the maturity to the USB3.0 platform Ã¢Â€Â“ a flash drive has

always been a flash drive, but this has started to change as we are

now seeing a new breed of flash drive come on to the market that is

targeted for the mobile user as opposed to just the desktop and

notebook user.

This new type of USB standard is called USB On-The-Go or USB-OTG for

short. With mobile devices now becoming more integral in our lives,

the need to have more storage to hand is greater than ever. For a

couple of years now we have seen wireless hard drives flowing of the

shelves and whilst they offer up a simple solution for expanding your

storage capacity, they are not exactly small and they are not

necessarily the cheapest way to solve the problem. An alternative

solution to expand the storage capacity on a number of devices is to

insert a microSD card, but once again this is not always possible with

many products not having microSD card readers on them. Across every

mobile device however there is one option that is available to work

with Ã¢Â€Â“ USB.

MicroUSB is virtually standard on every mobile device that one can

get today and with the Android OS now as feature rich as ever, support

for the next generation of USB storage is starting to be rolled out,

giving users a hassle free way of accessing their data on the go. The

DataTraveler microDuo that I'm looking at today is Kingston's first

native USB-OTG flash drive and this support is provided through a

microUSB port on one end of the drive whilst a full-sized USB jack on

the other end allows the drive to be used in the traditional manner in

a desktop or notebook system.

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