Less than a year ago I reviewed several great USB Flash drives, all nice and fast and around 4 gigabytes in capacity. One I liked a lot was the Kingston DataTraveler HyperX, but at the time the $131 list price put it at $60 bucks more than the average. Even the 8GB version at the time was $266.

This week Kingston announced the DataTraveler 150 series, and they're massive. Not in size (it is a thumb drive) but capacity: 32GB and 64GB. Better yet are the prices: $108 and $177 direct, respectively. Amazon is selling the drives for even less, at $63.36 and $118.99, respectively.

How does Kingston make the drives so capacious and so cheap? EverythingUSB believes Kingston is using MLC (multi-level cell) Flash memory, which is less expensive than SLC (single-level cell). It's also slower.

The DataTraveler 150 is apparently running around 28 to 30 megabytes per second (MBps) read speeds and 8-MBps writes. That first number is pretty good, but the second number is about half of what I got when testing the HyperX a few months ago. In fact, it's so slow that the 150s do not support Windows ReadyBoost when used with Vista.

If you can overlook the speed issue, another potential selling point is that Kingston, unlike most of its USB drive competition, doesn't put anything on the drive--no extra software you don't want. They look purty, too, with red for the 64GB version and orange for the 32GB.