password-protect your drive – or complete applications designed to run off your flash disk. A platform called U3, developed by industry leaders Sandisk and M-Systems – which are merging later this year – makes it simpler to launch Windows applications from a Smart USB drive, and to store your preferences, profiles and data on the same device.

Such list of portable programs that will run off a USB drive on OS X. Also, although I haven’t tried it yet, you can bring an entire Linux system with you—complete with desktop applications – and boot off the USB drive with Damn Small Linux, which takes up only 50MB, or Puppy Linux, which uses 64MB.

Flash drives have already all but killed off floppy disks, but it’s still unclear if they will one

NOT too long ago, flash drives were just for geeks.

But these days, almost anyone who uses a computer is likely to have one, and some people even use it as a fashion accessory. The device, no larger than your thumb, is known by a variety of names: thumb drive, flash drive, flash disk, keydrive, keychain drive, clip drive, data stick, memory key and (erroneously) memory stick. All these refer to the USB flash drive, a storage device that uses flash memory to store data and programs and that connects to computers through the universal serial bus (USB).

The flash drive was conceived by Dov Moran in 1998, when his laptop refused to boot before a presentation to a group of investors in New York. “With all eyes on me, I smiled, ad-libbed and frantically continued to press the start button,” Moran recalls in an article in EE Times. The laptop eventually booted and Moran was able to play his 6 megabyte (MB) presentation, but out of the near-snafu was born the idea of a portable storage device that would be easier to use and that would plug straight into the USB port.

Moran’s company, M-Systems of Israel, filed a patent for the USB drive in 1999, but only brought it to market in 2000, when IBM introduced the 8-megabyte Memory Key as the first USB flash drive. The device cost $55 to make.

Today, when flash drives can run up to 4 gigabytes – or about 4,000 MB – the original 8MB Memory Key seems almost ridiculous. And for less than half the cost of the first flash drive, you can buy a 1GB drive that provides 125 times the storage capacity.

Economies of scale and the entry of Asian manufacturers have greatly reduced the prices, but when buying, it’s important to remember that not all USB drives were created equal. Immediately disregard anything below 256MB – very few companies still make these drives and any you see on the store shelves are likely to be based on old, slower, and more expensive technology.

Unless you enjoy watching a progress bar crawl lazily toward completion, look for the “Hi-Speed USB” logo, which indicates that it is a USB 2.0 device. If you’re in a real hurry, or if you work with large video files, look for a flash drive with a speed rating. (Makers of slower drives will be silent about this because they have nothing to brag about.) The industry has adopted the standard used by CD-ROM drives, with multiples of the single-speed CD drive of 150 kilobytes per second. So an 80X drive will transfer files at a maximum rate of 12MB per second, while a 150X device will move data at 22.5MB per second. If you’re copying a 700MB file, the slower drive would take a minute, while the faster one would take just half the time.

Beyond storage and speed, look at software bundles that make sense. USB drives with these extras are called Smart USB drives, a category that the research company Gartner expects will begin outselling traditional storage-only drives by 2008. The bundles can be fairly simple – say, security software that allows you to password-protect your drive – or complete applications designed to run off your flash disk. A platform called U3, developed by industry leaders Sandisk and M-Systems – which are merging later this year – makes it simpler to launch Windows applications from a Smart USB drive, and to store your preferences, profiles and data on the same device.

Such list of portable programs that will run off a USB drive on OS X. Also, although I haven’t tried it yet, you can bring an entire Linux system with you—complete with desktop applications – and boot off the USB drive with Damn Small Linux, which takes up only 50MB, or Puppy Linux, which uses 64MB.

Flash drives have already all but killed off floppy disks, but it’s still unclear if they will one

frantically continued to press the start button,” Moran recalls in an article in EE Times. The laptop eventually booted and Moran was able to play his 6 megabyte (MB) presentation, but out of the near-snafu was born the idea of a portable storage device that would be easier to use and that would plug straight into the USB port.

Moran’s company, M-Systems of Israel, filed a patent for the USB drive in 1999, but only brought it to market in 2000, when IBM introduced the 8-megabyte Memory Key as the first USB flash drive. The device cost $55 to make.

Today, when flash drives can run up to 4 gigabytes – or about 4,000 MB – the original 8MB Memory Key seems almost ridiculous. And for less than half the cost of the first flash drive, you can buy a 1GB drive that provides 125 times the storage capacity.

Economies of scale and the entry of Asian manufacturers have greatly reduced the prices, but when buying, it’s important to remember that not all USB drives were created equal. Immediately disregard anything below 256MB – very few companies still make these drives and any you see on the store shelves are likely to be based on old, slower, and more expensive technology.

Unless you enjoy watching a progress bar crawl lazily toward completion, look for the “Hi-Speed USB” logo, which indicates that it is a USB 2.0 device. If you’re in a real hurry, or if you work with large video files, look for a flash drive with a speed rating. (Makers of slower drives will be silent about this because they have nothing to brag about.) The industry has adopted the standard used by CD-ROM drives, with multiples of the single-speed CD drive of 150 kilobytes per second. So an 80X drive will transfer files at a maximum rate of 12MB per second, while a 150X device will move data at 22.5MB per second. If you’re copying a 700MB file, the slower drive would take a minute, while the faster one would take just half the time.

Beyond storage and speed, look at software bundles that make sense. USB drives with these extras are called Smart USB drives, a category that the research company Gartner expects will begin outselling traditional storage-only drives by 2008. The bundles can be fairly simple – say, security software that allows you to password-protect your drive – or complete applications designed to run off your flash disk. A platform called U3, developed by industry leaders Sandisk and M-Systems – which are merging later this year – makes it simpler to launch Windows applications from a Smart USB drive, and to store your preferences, profiles and data on the same device.

Such list of portable programs that will run off a USB drive on OS X. Also, although I haven’t tried it yet, you can bring an entire Linux system with you—complete with desktop applications – and boot off the USB drive with Damn Small Linux, which takes up only 50MB, or Puppy Linux, which uses 64MB.

Flash drives have already all but killed off floppy disks, but it’s still unclear if they will one

n buy a 1GB drive that provides 125 times the storage capacity.

Economies of scale and the entry of Asian manufacturers have greatly reduced the prices, but when buying, it’s important to remember that not all USB drives were created equal. Immediately disregard anything below 256MB – very few companies still make these drives and any you see on the store shelves are likely to be based on old, slower, and more expensive technology.

Unless you enjoy watching a progress bar crawl lazily toward completion, look for the “Hi-Speed USB” logo, which indicates that it is a USB 2.0 device. If you’re in a real hurry, or if you work with large video files, look for a flash drive with a speed rating. (Makers of slower drives will be silent about this because they have nothing to brag about.) The industry has adopted the standard used by CD-ROM drives, with multiples of the single-speed CD drive of 150 kilobytes per second. So an 80X drive will transfer files at a maximum rate of 12MB per second, while a 150X device will move data at 22.5MB per second. If you’re copying a 700MB file, the slower drive would take a minute, while the faster one would take just half the time.

Beyond storage and speed, look at software bundles that make sense. USB drives with these extras are called Smart USB drives, a category that the research company Gartner expects will begin outselling traditional storage-only drives by 2008. The bundles can be fairly simple – say, security software that allows you to password-protect your drive – or complete applications designed to run off your flash disk. A platform called U3, developed by industry leaders Sandisk and M-Systems – which are merging later this year – makes it simpler to launch Windows applications from a Smart USB drive, and to store your preferences, profiles and data on the same device.

Such list of portable programs that will run off a USB drive on OS X. Also, although I haven’t tried it yet, you can bring an entire Linux system with you—complete with desktop applications – and boot off the USB drive with Damn Small Linux, which takes up only 50MB, or Puppy Linux, which uses 64MB.

Flash drives have already all but killed off floppy disks, but it’s still unclear if they will one

his because they have nothing to brag about.) The industry has adopted the standard used by CD-ROM drives, with multiples of the single-speed CD drive of 150 kilobytes per second. So an 80X drive will transfer files at a maximum rate of 12MB per second, while a 150X device will move data at 22.5MB per second. If you’re copying a 700MB file, the slower drive would take a minute, while the faster one would take just half the time.

Beyond storage and speed, look at software bundles that make sense. USB drives with these extras are called Smart USB drives, a category that the research company Gartner expects will begin outselling traditional storage-only drives by 2008. The bundles can be fairly simple – say, security software that allows you to password-protect your drive – or complete applications designed to run off your flash disk. A platform called U3, developed by industry leaders Sandisk and M-Systems – which are merging later this year – makes it simpler to launch Windows applications from a Smart USB drive, and to store your preferences, profiles and data on the same device.

Such list of portable programs that will run off a USB drive on OS X. Also, although I haven’t tried it yet, you can bring an entire Linux system with you—complete with desktop applications – and boot off the USB drive with Damn Small Linux, which takes up only 50MB, or Puppy Linux, which uses 64MB.

Flash drives have already all but killed off floppy disks, but it’s still unclear if they will one

password-protect your drive – or complete applications designed to run off your flash disk. A platform called U3, developed by industry leaders Sandisk and M-Systems – which are merging later this year – makes it simpler to launch Windows applications from a Smart USB drive, and to store your preferences, profiles and data on the same device.

Such list of portable programs that will run off a USB drive on OS X. Also, although I haven’t tried it yet, you can bring an entire Linux system with you—complete with desktop applications – and boot off the USB drive with Damn Small Linux, which takes up only 50MB, or Puppy Linux, which uses 64MB.

Flash drives have already all but killed off floppy disks, but it’s still unclear if they will one day replace hard disks on computers as well. Right now, hard disks are still way ahead in terms of capacity and price. Of course, barely six or seven years ago, a major PC vendor had scoffed at the very idea of flash drives, telling Moran: “One hundred floppies will cost much less than your device!”