Kingston’s DataTraveler 2000 Flash Drive Keeps Your Data Secure With Physical Pin Entry

Kingston has long produced secure flash drives, but its latest, the DataTraveler 2000, could very well be its best ever. There are two reasons for that: it offers a hardware PIN to keep it secure, and the OS you use doesn’t matter.

As a hardware-based solution, the DT 2000 keeps your data encrypted with hardware under its hood; as soon as the drive is unplugged, the data becomes 100% secure again. The fact that this is hardware-based encryption means that no software solution is needed, which in turn means this will work with Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome, and Android.

If support of the lesser-used OSes doesn’t matter to you too much, what still stands out about this drive is its PIN pad for decrypting the data. This is alphanumerical, so you could either remember a numbered PIN to unlock, or secure it with a word. Ultimately, it’s numbers you are effectively typing in, but a word or even words could help secure the drive further.

However, one thing to bear in mind is that even a simple PIN should keep the data safe, because after 10 invalid entries, the encryption key resets, and the data formats. This means brute force attacks are going to prove useless very quickly, and your data will end up becoming ultimately safe because it will no longer exist after those 10 invalid entries.

The DataTraveler 2000 is due out later Q1, and will be available in 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB flavors. For the 32GB and 64GB drives, speeds are 135MB/s read and 40MB/s write; for the 16GB, speeds are 120MB/s read and 20MB/s write.