Funny, it seems like almost yesterday Kingston would delight us with the announcement of the first 128GB USB flash drive. And now, it is unveiling another premiere: the world's first 256GB USB Flash drive, again from the DataTraveler series. Codenamed the DataTraveler 300, this little device will allow users to literally carry an entire hard drive in their breast pockets. This is good news especially for notebook and netbook users that find themselves in lack of space. And let us face it, where netbooks are concerned at least, space is really an issue.

“The DataTraveler 300 will enable users to carry huge volumes of data with them everywhere they go – up to 365 CDs for example. That’s one album for every day of the year, and it demonstrates how far flash technology has developed,” said Kirsty Miller, Product Marketing Manager – Consumer, Kingston Technology Europe. “Business users and consumers can also safeguard their data by initialising the Password Traveler software which will allow them to password protect their data in a privacy zone without the need of administrator rights.”

The DataTraveler 300 features the same design as the other devices from the series, including the safety cap and is Windows ReadyBoost enabled, which means you'll be getting a huge boost in memory should you use it with Windows Vista or Windows 7. As for data read and write rates, that's 20 MB/s read and 10MB/s write... which is not all that bad considering you're not going to get the device in order to back up your computer.

It has an operating temperature of 32 to 140 degrees Fahrenheit (0 to 60 degrees Celsius) and features a MSRP of 565 pounds (without VAT). That's almost 930 USD. Way too much for me but should anyone get a hold of one, feel free to leave a comment.


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