Review - Kensington DataTraveler BlackBox

I've always had good luck with the DataTraveler series and so far I'm pretty impressed with the new BlackBox edition. It's got a good solid feel and weight to it and it's even FIPS 140-2 certified. Unlike some of the new secure drives that have come out, this one does Not require Admin access to work properly. I tested it out as a normal User on an XP SP2 box and didn't have any problems at all. The drive setup is a breeze and it is configured to lock out your data after 10 invalid password attempts. After that, they say you have to completely format the drive to be able to use it again.



I'm too lazy to detail all the screen caps for setting it up, you can find them in the manual pdf on their website.

When done, it'll just settle into a nice task tray icon.





The only downside so far is that on my x64 Vista box, I get an error every time I plug it in but if I hit Retry after a few seconds it'll work fine afterwards.




Overall I'm giving this one a thumb's up. It's probably only a matter of time until someone publishes a hack for it but ain't that always the case.

Link to the BlackBox page on Kingston's site:
http://www.kingston.com/flash/DTBlackBox.asp