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At one backup per night, that's 27 to 270 years of nightly backups. I think you are probably safe if you swap to a new memory stick every decade ;). Your bound to need to increase the size of the memory stick by then anyhow, so it doesn't seem like an issue.

I wouldn't trust it as my only backup for sure, but it sounds like it would be ok to use as one more step.

...or are you just glad to see me?

Seriously, the barn door's been open and the horse halfway to Topeka on this one for a while. Who needs an iPod? I've been carrying around virtually my entire business on one of these things for over a year. Sure, take away my music player, phone, key chain, watch, whatever, I'm a big boy and you pay me enough to play along, but at what point short of a strip search and replacing the pink-haired receptionist with a Brinks guard to watch over the stash does this policy become a smidge unwieldy?

(However, I do throw my whole-hearted support behind any policy which confiscates iPods (or sunglasses, for that matter) from any too-cool-for-the-room tool who doesn't stow them shortly after he enters the building...)

I've had a 256mb Fuji for 18 months now, and a 8mb DiskOnKey for 2 years before that (the Fuji is a re-branded DiskOnKey drive). The complaints from Ars Technica are only valid if you keep your flash drive on a lanyard. As I can't stand anything hanging off my neck (too much like a tie!), I keep mine clipped to my keyring. I've never had it come unclipped, nor have I lost the drive part (the clip is on the cover, not the drive itself). In fact, having the clip on the cover is very useful, as I can leave it connected to my keyring while the drive is in use.

I'm surprised the review didn't cover performance under GnuPG and PGP -- I keep my keyrings on it, as well as my Quicken backups. Plus tons of room left for mp3s to listen while at work. The SiSoft benchmarks are nice, but I'd like to know how slow/fast they are relative to an IDE drive.

Chip H.

Have a look at m-systems their Disk On Key seems to support USB booting according to their literature.

A friend of mine had a Toshiba laptop way back when and it fell of the third floor fire-escape and landed on concrete below. The casing was a bit cracked and the keyboard popped off, but it still worked.

But speaking of "hardy hardware", I bought a 128MB USB memory drive a couple years ago when they first started hitting the market. I bought a DiskOnKey drive and it had quite an interesting spec sheet that said it could withstand shock up to 10 G's and vibrations of 5 G's. Not bad for a little drive like that. Most of the other ones I've seen recently are very fragile and the casing will pop open even when dropped from desk height.

(When I first saw the site name, I thought to myself, "Dis Konkey? What a stupid name.")

...because he sure has some huge balls to just walk up to a demo computer and try that!!

It's interesting to note that the article mentions Disk On Key. A few weeks ago, my friend's place of business had a meeting, and basically the whole premise was that any visitors to the company had to have their keychains checked for such devices, as they were worried about people coming in to visit, and leaving with a copy of a database. I wouldn't be surprised if other companies start adopting a policy of searching for those types of devices either.

I'm beginning to prefer Yahoo! webmail over using local clients. I can access it whereever there is a web browswer and it's always in one place.

I can download and run PuTTY through the computer's browser or (if the computer supports it) I can plug in my DiskOnKey and run PuTTY off of that. With that going, I can then log into my computer and use mutt to read my mail. With GPG installed, I can sign and/or encrypt outgoing mail and validate and/or decrypt incoming mail. Mailing lists are automatically dumped into their own directories, while other classes of mail (HTML mail and mail from known spammers, mainly) gets bounced. Try doing that with Hotmail or other webmail services.

Personally I'd rather have a Firewire one instead. Transferring 1GB over USB would take quite a while.

I just ordered one so I'll soon find out if it lives up to it's claims.

---

at work i use NT and at home OS X. I find it to be extremely handy for carrying source code to and from work.
incidentally, OS X.1 added support for the IBM keydrive.
additionally, i think diskonkey make all of the IBM keys, although diskonkey come in 128 meg versions, and i only see 8 meg ones on IBM's site.

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

I want the m-systems disk-on-key.

It's a flash memory stick on a keychain that has a USB plug on it. Plug it in an copy files to it. Works under Linux too.

I wonder if it's the M-Systems USB Flash Disk on Key product...

Me an a budy had an idea for a product based on one of these devices last fall. When we contacted them, they said IBM had bought out there entire production for the next few quarters. Sorry we have no engineering samples to sell you. (and no it was not the IBM product, it was an idea I thought was marginal but worth trying and may still happen...)

Makes me wonder...

TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken

M-Systems has had a real presence at the few embedded linux conferences I've seen. Worth looking at M-Systems other FLASH storage devices for those embedded apps.

Disk on Key from M-Systems has up to 32 Mb 'keys' now and plans up to a 512 Mb USB device this year. They claim to work with Win, Mac, and Linux.