Kingston Data Traveler II Plus 2 GB - Migo Edition

smartjean4u

Fastest Transfer speeds, Good build quality, 5 years warranty. Migo doesn't support many software, Bit expensive. Rating :
During the past month, we have reviewed a several thumb drives: Kingston U3 Data Traveler 1GB, Corsair Flash Voyager 2GB and Transcend Jetflash 120 2GB to name a few. All of them were winners either software wise, feature wise or performance wise. Today, we have one more thumb drive called the Kingston Data Traveler II Plus - Migo Edition 2GB.

The Drive
The Kingston Data Traveler II Plus Migo is a USB based thumb drive available in four memory capacities - 256 MB, 512 MB, 1GB and 2GB. There are two types of Data Traveler II edition; one with Migo software and one without. Obviously, there will be some price difference in the version without the Migo Software. But, how much Migo offers in terms of features and value will ultimately decide the price factor of the thumb drive, along with the performance, of course.



It is a simple looking thumb drive lacking anything fancy. It sports a small yellow color LED as an indicator for read-write operations. This, at times, makes the thumb drive look ordinary. A little more effort should have been put into the aesthetics. It measures 67.7 x 20.8 x 9.0 mm (L x W x D) and weighs roughly around 15 grams. Just like in case of most of the portable drives we tested in recent times, this thumb drive lacks a write protection lock.

The Migo Software
Migo software enables you to sync your computer to the Data Traveler II Plus Migo Edition. What Migo essentially does is creates a computer profile on the drive, enabling you to access corresponding data on the desktop and making it available for editing on a guest computer. After you make changes to documents on the guest computer, you can plug the Data Traveler II Plus Migo into your main computer at a later date and sync all the files. The device also enables you to password protect everything on the drive with the help of a bundled software called Secure Traveler.



Once you've installed the Migo software, the synchronize window opens, which gives you the capability to synchronize certain files to the device. Migo by default synchronizes the desktop files. If there are more files that you need to synchronize, you need to adjust Migo's file option settings to reflect the changes that you want.
It also synchronizes Microsoft Outlook email inbox items if that is your email client, and it syncs with Internet Explorer bookmarks, cookies, history and home page. Sadly, it doesn't support Outlook Express or Mozilla Thunderbird or Firefox.

Performance
On formatting the drive, it offered 1.92 GB of space. The synced files will keep on consuming additional memory on the thumb drive over the period. We transferred our standard test folder which contains hundreds of smaller files to and from the drive, after which we transferred a single large file in both directions. Following are the results:

Multiple Files (Read): 17.15 MBps

Multiple Files (Write): 7.30 MBps

Single Large File (Read): 17.52 MBps

Single Large File (Write): 15.30 MBps


Conclusion
The Kingston Data Travelwe II Plus Migo Edition sells for Rs. 5,500/- with 5 years of warranty. It had the fastest read and write speeds till date, but when you compare it to the Transcend Jetflash 120 2 GB drive which sells for around 4,500 and has performance marginally lower than this Kingston drive, the extra 1,000 bucks seem like a big premium. Then the Migo Software also has to be taken into consideration, but sadly I didn't find Migo Software all that useful and the utility is very limited. The U3 platform does a much better job than Migo. All and all, the Kingston Data Traveler II Plus Migo Edition drive is an excellent product but a touch pricey and Migo software doesn't warrant that premium.