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For the most part USB memory keys are much of a muchness. Occasionally you'll find one that's unusually fast, such as the Corsair Voyager GT, or one with an in-built card reader such as the Kingston DataTraveller Reader, but for the most part there's little that sets one apart from another.

Still, the companies involved in this market manfully continue to try and differentiate their products and Lexar has done just that with its JumpDrive Secure II Plus. Although it looks like any other USB drive, it has one rather smart feature that sets it apart: a capacity meter. It seems like such a simple idea, and god knows plenty of people have probably dreamed of such a feature, yet it's not something that's seen too often.

In theory it's an eminently useful little feature, allowing you to know roughly how much space is available on the drive without actually plugging it into a computer. The meter uses a percentage scale, with ten increments of 10 per cent each.

It must be noted, however, that this isn't quite the perfect solution. Ideally this could be split into 1GB major increments, with 500MB minor increments. This sort of arrangement would be more intuitive, as the percentage method requires you to have a basic grasp how the reading shown relates to the amount of storage remaining.

Moreover, the Corsair Flash Readout boasts similar functionality but with none of the ambiguity of the Lexar. As the name suggests, it has an LCD readout showing the exact amount of space left on the drive. Compared to this, the Lexar's percentage meter seems rather primitive.

Other than the capacity meter the JumpDrive Secure II Plus is completely unremarkable. The casing is finished in dull black plastic, and that plastic is hardly of the highest quality either. It feels rather cheap and nasty, and certainly couldn’t take much in the way of punishment were one to drop it, or accidently tread on it. It also has a removable cap, which as ever, is only likely to be lost.

As you can tell, aside from the capacity meter the design is pretty ordinary and doesn't really match that of SanDisk or Corsair – or any number of other USB keys for that matter.

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