Kingston has another drive series called the Kingston DataTraveler Vault Privacy Edition that is virtually identical to the DataTraveler 4000, but doesn’t have FIPS 140-2 Level 2 certification. Kingston rates these drives as having speeds of up to 18 MB/s read and 10 MB/s write. The Kingston DataTraveler 4000 is a FIPS 140-2 Level 2 certified drive that uses dual-channel MLC NAND. Kingston Technology has dominated the Flash memory market for years and they too, have FIPS 140-2 Certified devices on the market today. The only difference here is that IronKey Personal also includes an online Identity Manager to safely generate, store, and backup strong passwords. We will be looking at the basic and personal versions of these drives.

Both the IronKey S200 and D200 series are backed by a one year warranty. So, you lose about 30% of the performance, but the security remains the same. These drives have read speeds of up to 25 MB/s and write speeds of up to 17 MB/s. Ironkey also has the more affordable D200 series available that has dual-channel MLC NAND Flash memory components on it. IronKey rates these drives as having up to 27 MB/s read and up to 24 MB/s write speeds. SLC typically lasts 10 times longer than MLC and believe it or not these USB Flash drives do use hardware-based wear leveling, much like many of the Solid-State Drives (SSDs) found on the market today. The S2000 series uses more expensive, high performance and longer lasting dual-channel SLC NAND Flash memory components. They have numerous FIPS 140-2 Certified devices, but they have two main models the S200 and D200 that are both FIPS 140-2 Level 3 certified. IronKey came to the market bringing secure USB Flash drives to the market nearly a decade ago and have been focusing on security since day one.

Ironkey flash drive