http://www.nando.net/technology/story/503322p-4012672c.html (August 19, 2002 8:34 a.m. EDT) - It's time to bag the floppy disk drive. The drives, whether the 5.25-inch from the early days of personal computing or the almost-universal 3.5-inch plastic squares of today, are no longer necessary. A new widget called a Cruzer has convinced me that floppies are now as quaint as shirt armbands and sock garters. Regular readers will know that this is a bit like the Supreme Court declaring Casual Mondays and putting aside those stuffy black robes for sandals and shorts. Every system recommended here has included at least one floppy drive, and Apple was soundly thrashed for not including one on the iMac. No more. Here's what brought about the sea change: Cruzer is a grey-and-black flash memory widget with a USB port. It measures 1.73 by 2.68 inches and is 0.67 inches thick. It weighs about as much as a small tube of lip gel. But it will hold 32, 64, 128 or 256 megabytes of data and work effortlessly and seamlessly on both Windows and Mac platforms. It's a new product from SanDisk Corporation of Sunnyvale, Calif. When connected to the USB (Universal Serial Bus) port of a running system, the Cruzer becomes just another disk drive and you can write to it, read from it, erase, copy - all the things you can do with a standard hard drive. But because it is flash memory - no moving parts - moving files to or from the Cruzer is very, very fast, much faster than a CD-ROM read-write drive. And any electricity it needs comes from the USB connection. To put all that in perspective, the hard disk drives that stored stock information for The Associated Press 25 years ago stored 10 megabytes. They were the size of washing machines, took two strong men to lift, and had to be kept in an air-conditioned power-condition environment. The 64-megabyte Cruzor review unit, with the data capacity of six of those monsters, comfortably shared a shirt pocket with a cell phone for the trip from the office computer to the home computer for data transfer tests. And it cared not a whit that the temperature on the train platform in Penn Station was around 115 F. The cost of the Cruzer is also comparatively tiny - $49.99 for the 32-megabyte version, $74.99 for the 64 megabyte and, by the time you're up to 256 megabytes, $199.99. Because it behaves just like a hard drive, Cruzer doesn't care what size your files are, up to capacity. And the storage cards can be removed and upgraded. The product comes with a two-inch USB extension cable, but you don't have to use it. And it comes with some encryption software that you don't have to use either. It also doesn't require drivers. For Windows machines, the requirements are a Pentium PC with USB support and Windows 98, 98SE, 2000, ME or XP. The Mac needs USB support and either Mac OS 9.1.whatever or OSX v10.1.2+. (Now that Apple gets a pass on its no-floppy products, the new gripe will be about the way it labels its operating system versions. Do we really need three decimal places?) SanDisk products are available at retail. And you can find them at the sandisk.com Web site. Note that the prices quoted on the Web site are higher for the first two levels of storage than the prices now being quoted by company reps. The Cruzer is being promoted as a "keychain" drive and comes with a little fuzzy carrier that has a keyhook, but that's probably not the best way to use it.