Listing of July 1996 Reviews
By James E. Miller
A chameleon, the DataPak 340 Type III PC Card hard disk from Kingston
Technology provides notebook users with ample storage flexibility.
The device's large 340MB capacity-more space than was available
on many notebooks just a year ago-dramatically increases any laptop's
storage capabilities.
To install the DataPak on a notebook running Windows 95, simply
plug it into the portable's Type III slot. Windows 95's Plug-and-Play
feature then takes over. You are prompted to either install a
Windows default driver (which I did), select a driver on a diskette
supplied by the manufacturer, not install a driver or select from
an alternate list of drivers. After selecting OK, you get the
familiar beep of a PC Card being recognized. That's all it takes.
If you look under My Computer, you'll see a drive letter corresponding
to the DataPak.
Aside from the DataPak's compact size, another remarkable feature
is the lack of disk compression. Every megabyte on the device
is real. So, if you decide to compress the drive, say with DriveSpace
3 from Microsoft's Plus pack, you'll increase the drive's capacity
to 700MB or more.
If a group of people in the office need to share information,
the DataPak makes passing data from one laptop to another almost
as easy as copying the data to a floppy. The DataPak can also
serve as a hard disk backup solution.
Product specifications include a rated average seek time of 10.6
milliseconds and a data-transfer rate of 5.7MB per second, as
well as power consumption levels of .005 watts in sleep and standby
modes and 1.3 watts when in use. In my data-transfer testing,
I dragged and dropped files of up to about 50MB and achieved transfer
rates of a little over 2MBps. These results are well below the
rated speed, but still satisfactory. The specs also say the DataPak
can withstand up to 750Gs of force.
Info File
Kingston DataPak 340
Price: $529
Pros: Capacity; installation
Cons: Speed
Platforms: Windows 95, 3.1x
Kingston Technology Corp.
800-337-8410, 714-435-2600
WinMag Box Score: 3.5