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but maybe not with Linux support.

usbdrive
thumbdrive
"Q" drive

Just buy one of those nifty MP3 CD players (like the one mentioned in the article) and one of these for copying those songs from your friends computer and then copying them back to your computer. No protection at all since its just a really mini keychain USB hard drive.

Sad story. I've been keeping my financial data in an excel spreadsheet on a floppy for over a year. Despite the horrendous history of floppies, I never lost data. About a month after I bought my "Q" drive I had it plugged into my Win98 box when the power went out. Once I regained power I tried to use the drive but the filesystem was fucked. Everytime I tried to access the drive I'd get something to the effect of "Can't access file system. Would you like to format"? I tried emailing Agatetech support to see if they had any recovery utilities. I never heard a response. In the end I formatted and called it a loss.

Agatetech has the coolest looking drive IMO but thier support sucks ass and I wouldn't put too much trust in thier reliability.

For those who are intersted, here are some manufacturers:
Agatetech :: Thumbdrive :: FlashDIO :: DiskOnKey

Sad story. I've been keeping my financial data in an excel spreadsheet on a floppy for over a year. Despite the horrendous history of floppies, I never lost data. About a month after I bought my "Q" drive I had it plugged into my Win98 box when the power went out. Once I regained power I tried to use the drive but the filesystem was fucked. Everytime I tried to access the drive I'd get something to the effect of "Can't access file system. Would you like to format"? I tried emailing Agatetech support to see if they had any recovery utilities. I never heard a response. In the end I formatted and called it a loss.

Agatetech has the coolest looking drive IMO but thier support sucks ass and I wouldn't put too much trust in thier reliability.

For those who are intersted, here are some manufacturers:
Agatetech :: Thumbdrive :: FlashDIO :: DiskOnKey

If your not using yours, I'd be interested in buying it if your want to sell it. My friend saw my 32MB Q drive and he wants one.

Perhaps this user was referring to this innovative product. A key-sized usb 16MB hard drive. :-P Like such a thing is really that useful. (me not 007) In other news, I lost my keys. By the way, I wonder if whoever manufactues such a riduculous thing as a ram hard drive would use a batter to back it up, or just use Flash or EEPROM, not like it really matters because they would both be too small/slow to compete with it's motive mechanical mass storage peers. All of you are wrong, thank you for your precous time.

1. These really don't hold that much - 8 MB can't even store very large word-processing/spreadsheet documents let alone presentations/databases/mp3s (can't forget them)

It all depends on what you want to store on it, yes storing your complete working environment on it (as has been suggested in the past for some new storage medium) is probably unworkable, but storing temporary files, or sensitive data (like crypto keys and password) could be quite usable. And remember 8M is not so little, many PDAs get by with a lot less, iirc the various Palm species and clones top out at 8M.

If this sort of device becomes popular, then larger version will appear, indeed the URL given by someone else details devices with 64M of storage.

2.USB is not completely popular yet, or at least not completely supported. Many computers are still in use that don't have a USB port, or that don't have them installed.

True, but it is a start. The only reasonable alternatives would be parallel or serial ports, and frankly there are too many weird things hanging off of those already (dongles, Zip drives, scanners, and even occasionally printers). USB is reasonably fast, becoming more ubiquitous and supporting is getting better with time.

3.USB ports are most frequently in the back of a computer, making these little things very hard to use - my primary desktop is in a cabinet with minimal access to the back (but it's easy to pull out for hardware changes..I just don't need to mess with my cables often). This reminds me of A/V in ports on TVs and VCRs - too often they're annoyingly in the back.

Popularity could changes that, my TV has S-Video and Phone A/V connectors on the front (under a small cover) for easy access with video games and cameras. The same could happen with USB if necessary. With laptops this is not even a problem.

4. Way too expensive. These should be $10, not $50, so students would want to buy them over a $0.50 floppy disk.

As with any technology, popularity may bring it down.

5. As others have pointed out, if put on a keychain one would have to leave their keys in the USB port in order to access it - dumb..if it was removable (without removing keyring, like a button trigger)

The IBM version seems to allow the key to be removed from the keyring.

then there's the ever present danger of losing such a small device.

You can't have it both ways, its small and convenient, so there is always going to be a risk of losing it.

Just my thoughts, but hey, I could be wrong. Watch me buy one in the next few years in spite of myself.

I'm tempted myself, and I can't think of a good reason why I need one! (Aside from a new toy :-)

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64mb would be perfect? Look to: Agaté Technologies then - they have a 64Mb model in Graphite colour.