Kingston DataTraveler 410 8GB Flash Drive (USB2.0 Portable) DT410/8GB

Pros: The rotating cover is nice, no cap to loose but you can still attach it to a lanyard. Bright blue LED, cutout in the rotating cover so it shows through. Different design on each side so right side up/right side down is easy to determine without looking at the USB plug. Read/write speed as expected for this level of technology.

Easily made bootable as a DOS/Linux disk. 8GB of flash storage for less than $30 is nice.

Cons: None as yet.

Overall Review: Excellent design, cheap price, decent read/write speed. I've never used a Kingston product I didn't like...

Pros: It seems to be fast. The form is good.

Cons: The drive description says it is an 8GB USB flash drive. It most certainly is not. It is a 7.46GB drive. When I received the drive I did not know that it came with encryption software. The first thing I did was remove the encryption software by formatting the drive. It reported 7.46GB drive before and after the formatting. This is a 6.6% difference from what I expect.

Kingston Technical support tells me, "after consulting with engineering" that this is acceptable. When I pay for 1000 apples I expect 1000 apples; not 934 apples.

I know very well the difference between 1024 and 1000 bytes. I understand that 8,000,000,000 bytes will actually be reported as 7.99GB when reported by the operating system. It will not be reported as 8, nor will it be reported as 7.45GB.

This flash device is missing 500MB of space and as far as I am concerned it is quite possibly because of additional unseen and unreported software being secretly housed. Ask yourself why.

Overall Review: I will look more into this. I may return the device to Newegg and ask for a different brand.