Kingston DataTravel 8GB Review

A lot of us have a good sized CD collection. MP3 players make it easy for you to take your audio collection on the go. Whether you use it for walking, bike riding, or jogging, MP3 players are very portable and easy to take your audio collection with you. They can be your portable stereo on the go. But for car stereo fans, the issue may not be to have a portable stereo on the go. You already have a car stereo for that. But what you do want is to bring your audio collection with you. Kingston can help you with that.

Many car stereos now have hook-ups for an iPod, or other MP3 players. But why spend all the money on an iPod or other MP3 player just as a storage device for you music collection. Depending on your car stereo you may not have the need for a nice color display or headphone jack. All you may be looking for is a storage device. My Kenwood KDC-X991 has a built in USB input. No need for an expensive iPod. Enter Kingston’s DataTraveler 8GB flash drive. You read right. It is just a regular flash drive. But it is portable, and can hold a lot of tunes with 8GB worth of storage. I would need about 16GB to fit my entire music collection on it and take it with me. You may only need 4GB for your music collection. But with models with up to 64GB in storage capacity, Kingston would have you covered.

The Kingston DataTraveler 8GB was easy to use. Since it is a USB device, all I did was connected it to my computer, and created my own folders. I have used other smaller capacity flash drives in my car. I make folders for different music types, like rock, pop, jazz, etc, and save those types of music in the folders. Then depending on the music I want to listen to, I go to that folder. I set up different folders on the Kingston DataTraveler, but for some reason it did not read it as different folders. Instead of being able to access my 100 or so CD’s in 5 different folders, I have to scroll through a long list. But it still works, and when I pick an album to listen to, all of the info shows up on my car stereo display, such as artist and song title. And as I am scrolling through the list of albums on the flash drive, I can see the artist and album info so I know which album I am on as I go thru the list. It may not give you as many features as an MP3 player, but it is a lot cheaper. And in today’s market, that is what many of us are looking for.