USB Flash Storage: AT LAST they figured out what it's all about ...

While vacationing in Phoenix, we made our mandatory pilgrimage to Fry's in Tempe. This is the world's largest electronics store; to walk out of Fry's empty-handed is almost unthinkable.

This mission began with my observation that Bob's ZIP drive takes an impossibly long time to read the 100MB disks I had just copied photos onto, using my own machine. Looking at his more closely, he has one of those old parallel-port drives; mine is an internal IDE.

Gosh, the Iomega lineup has changed since the last time we shopped for ZIP drives. USB 2.0, CDR, 750MB ZIP carts with backward compatibility. But we quickly found 750MB internal IDE ZIP drives, $149.99 each. We put two in the shopping basket. (I want to be able to read and write the carts we use for data swapping, right?)

Even though we have a ton of the old 100MB carts, it would be nice to take advantage of the 750MB capacity. My data swap had been about 2-1/2 100MB ZIP cartridges worth of hi-rez photo images. Two 3-packs of 750MB carts, $39.99 each.

So far, we're up to $380 to swap data by sneakernet, just to avoid having to string a 100-foot ethernet cable down the hall. I realized we'd need adapter mounting brackets to put the 3-1/2 drive in a 5-1/4 bay, and some kind of faceplate.

We wasted twenty minutes looking for the brackets and faceplate. That was the straw that broke the camel's back.

I said, "Y' know, let's re-think this. Let's go back over there. I want to look at something, and then maybe we'll just put all this stuff back."

Bob looked surprised. We'd agreed on this, we'd already invested some time and work to make it happen, and here I was having second thoughts!

I looked around to the left of the Iomega display area and found them. 256MB Lexar USB 2.0 Pro JumpDrives. I said, "Yeah, this is it. This is what we want. Let's put back all this other stuff."

"Well wait, wait a minute. How does this thing replace all this stuff?"

I said, "This end plugs into any USB port. It mounts like a drive, just like any flash card. And you read or write to it, put it in your pocket, and use it on any computer with USB, anywhere."

And "put back all the other stuff" we did. $129.00 each. The device is a little shorter than a BIC lighter. It comes with a plastic cap to keep the USB jack free of pocket lint. That's it. It's fast as heck, even on USB 1.0, has no switches to set or buttons to push, and it just plugs into any USB port on your computer, laptop or hub.

It's like the words to that old Dixieland song "South" - "where the right way is the easy way". We had to laugh as we put all that other expensive old-fashioned stuff back on Fry's display shelves.

Lexar makes other flavors of this device; if you have a ton of memory sticks floating around, you can "roll your own" with your existing flash memory and a portable card reader version of JumpDrive. There are other games in town, but Lexar's seemed the most logical of the various USB/Flash devices we saw displayed. You can click on the JumpDrive image above to go to the Lexar website and see for yourself.

USB and flash memory: AT LAST they've figured out what it's all about!