USB 2.0 Flash Drives

PNY's Attaché 1GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive

For years, my portable removable digital media storage solution of choice had been Iomega's Zip drive products. These drives are really reliable and can stand up to a lot of use. I started out with a Zip 100MB parallel port drive on my first home PC... a 200MHz Pentium II NEC. When I got my next PC, I went out and bought a sexier looking Zip 100MB USB (powered) drive. Sure, the Zip 250 MB had been out for a while, but I had a bunch of 100MB Zip disks. While they were backward compatible with the 250MB drive, I noticed that they performed much slower than if they were used in their native 100MB Zip drive. I opted to by the "older" technology. After all, it would be better suited for my situation and it was also cheaper. The fact that the drive was also powered by the USB connection, there was no power transformer to lug around. It was easy to swap the drive between machines without Zip drives if I wanted to.

What if I had a file larger than 100MB you ask? Well, luckily there are CD writers and CD-R media is cheap enough that I could throw files on a CD, copy them and toss the CD if I wanted to. Just about every Mac or PC sold in the last 5 years has a CD ROM drive capable of reading CD-R discs, so compatibility is not an issue. I don't transport many files larger than 700MB, so the capacity of CD-R discs has never limited me. One could always buy a DVD writer and enjoy 4.7GB capacity! Even the re-writable DVD media is reasonably priced nowadays. However, DVD drives were not standard on machines a few years old. Compatibility may be an issue. Enter, the USB Travel Drive.


Iomega's Zip 100MB USB powered external drive

USB Travel Drives are portable memory chips that are known by a bunch of names: jump drives, flash drives, thumb drives, portable drives, pen drives, etc. They all have a few things in common. They have a USB connector at one end, usually covered by a cap, and just plug into your computer, behaving like any old hard drive. You can write to them, copy from them, erase files and format them. They typically work faster than Zip drives and CD-Rs as far as data transfer is concerned. They come in capacities anywhere from 64MB to 4GB! Actually, there are larger capacities than 4GB, but they tend to not be as portable. Their size and weight starts to make cords a necessity again, cutting down on portability. Still... even the larger ones are more portable than an external drive like a Zip drive.


The Memorex U3 Mini Travel Drive 512MB

I bought my first USB travel drive recently. I needed it for work until they could order one for me to use and I intended to keep it for my own use after the order came in. I opted for a 512MB USB 2.0 drive from Memorex called a U3 Mini Travel Drive. It came with a nice lanyard to attach to the drive so you wouldn't lose it as easily. The U3 refers to the ability of this drive to have software installed on it that you can run off the chip as you would software installed on a hard disk. The programs would be self contained and could be shipped between compatible machines. When a U3 drive is plugged in, it shows up as a read only partition (mounts as a CD-ROM icon) that runs the program usage feature and a partition for read/write (mounts as a hard disk icon). I am not sure if this "feature" was the cause, but this drive did not work well from the day I bought it. File transfer would hang, sometimes crashing my computer, files would transfer to the drive then not transfer back off of it or only part of the file would. I tried transferring JPEGs, TIFFs, MP3s and on Macs and PCs... the results were always the same. The drive was completely unreliable. I guess I just got a lemon. My frustrations were eased after I found that Best Buy would refund my money even though I had to completely destroy the blister pack it came in. I kept the lanyard... bonus!

The next drive I tried is a PNY Attaché drive. This was the USB 2.0 variety with a 1GB capacity. The price was the same as the Memorex I bought a few weeks before even though the capacity was doubled. This drive has been working fine so far. It mounts as a plain old hard drive and file transfer is reliable so far. It does look a little cheesey and it feminine purple accent colors don't make me happy, but at least it works! That is the most important "feature" of any product.

I am starting to get used to the convenience of using these things. I wonder if this chip technology that requires no power for storage will begin replacing magnetic platter hard drives in the future. The size vs. capacity issue may be a problem. What I mean is, you may only be able to go so small with one of these flash drives. Larger capacity may mean lassoing a bunch of these smaller drives together. Next thing you know, you wind up with something much bigger than a bread box. Perhaps we will see Firewire travel drives or a new connector type all together for these drives. But what do I know?