I am not sure. Are all Kingston's not created equal?
Here is the exact one I bought for $21.99
(Kingston Datatraveler 300)
**broken link removed**
I will let you know in a few weeks when it gets here.
in any case aren't USB FLASH drives far slower than hard drives, and only have a limited write life.
I think that depends on where you are using and comparing them. My present thumb drive runs consistently at around 20 Mbs transfer rate and all of my external hard drives that use a USB port connection are about the same give or take a few meg.
The problem I have is that at my external hard drives seem to only last until about 2 - 3 months after their warranty expires, regardless of manufacturer, whether they get used regularly or not. However my 8 Gb memory stick has been around for 2 abusive and heavily used years and still seems to perform like it did the day I got it.
I am thinking about setting up one of my older slower computers as a main data archive system that has the lowest possible idle power consumption despite having a rather sizable memory capacity.
Basically what I am wanting to experiment with is large solid state memory capacity on the cheap using a older lower powered computer from the early 2000's era thats windows XP pro compatible.
I am just not sure about running a large number of memory sticks all at once with no actual internal hard drive installed though.