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Prime Drive Time

Sleek, capacious hard disks are making a new place for themselves in the home and on the road. We look at what's here and what's next.

Jon L. Jacobi

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Little Drives, Big Promises

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Photograph: Marc Simon
Flash memory drives in the popular thumb-drive format have moved beyond simple storage and are getting both handier and faster as they add new functions or upgrade to USB 2.0.

Vendor specs suggest many users can benefit by jumping from USB 1.1 to 2.0, which can yield speeds up to 9 megabytes per second for reads and 7 MBps for writes, up from about 1 MBps (read and write). Verbatim's Store-n-Go and M-Systems' DiskOnKey Classic 2.0 and Pro, among others, offer USB 2.0 drives in capacities up to 1GB (the 1GB models cost over $300).

You may be able to use them to boot up, too, provided that your PC's BIOS supports booting from flash (you should be able to upgrade your BIOS if a version with support is available). We tried unsuccessfully to boot from our DiskOnKey with several systems. The vendor described the program as problematic at this point and is leaving implementation to PC vendors, but M-Systems will furnish the utility to users on request.

Another trick, practiced by M-Systems and by Forward Solutions with its Migo drive ($150 for 128MB and $200 for 256MB), is a utility that transfers some of your desktop or e-mail settings between each PC you work on and (with the M-Systems drive) can also sync some files. We found the Migo's interface funky and a bit unintuitive, although it worked more automatically than the M-Systems unit; the concept may be more trouble than it's worth.

Last but not least: Expect more combination thumb drives. Vendors have been using the drive format to provide wireless 802.11b connectivity, but now Soyo offers both wireless capability and 128MB of storage in its $119 Aerielink Wireless Flash Combo. The unit worked well in our trials and is available now; a $199 256MB model is coming in early 2004.

Jon L. Jacobi

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