INTRODUCTION

   Accidents happen to all of us especially when we least expect them and so it's always a good idea to store all our sensitive data inside rugged storage media devices that can offer a considerably higher level of protection compared to regular everyday ones. Unfortunately as we speak manufacturers have seem to focus most of their resources for the design of rugged PHDs (Portable Hard Drives) and not so much in the design of rugged USB flash drives. As a matter of fact the last and perhaps best quality rugged USB flash drive I’ve ever used was designed and manufactured by Corsair roughly 5 years ago and let me tell you that it was no coincidence that they named it the Survivor GT (the casing was made by alloy used in aircraft). Cost however always plays a huge role when designing a USB flash drive and so most manufacturers seem to favor rubber coated casings that offer both shock and water resistance at a fraction of the price. The DataTraveler R3.0 G2 is the latest USB Flash Drive by Kingston that features such a casing and with us today we have the highest capacity 64GB model.

   Kingston Technology Company, Inc. is the world’s largest independent manufacturer of memory products. Kingston designs, manufactures and distributes memory products for desktops, laptops, servers, printers, and Flash memory products for PDAs, mobile phones, digital cameras, and MP3 players. Through its global network of subsidiaries and affiliates, Kingston has manufacturing facilities in California, Taiwan, China and sales representatives in the United States, Canada, Europe, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, Australia, New Zealand, India, Taiwan, China, and Latin America.

   Leaving out the rugged rubber casing which is obviously the most important feature (and its main selling point) of the DataTraveler R3.0 G2 its design is also something quite unique and although it's really not as tiny as some other USB flash drives (normal and rugged) it's also quite smaller compared to some other models manufactured even by Kingston themselves. In terms of performance the read and write speeds of the DT R3.0 G2 seems to be less than stellar (always according to the specs sheet) but judging by some of their previous models our friends over at Kingston are usually very "conservative" when reporting the performance of their drives so that's primarily what we need to see in this review.