Keychain drive fits in small bucket of sulphuric acid.

[Matthew X]

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.