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you mean like this or this?

I never encountered a USB stick with a read-only switch. Floppies had them (although they only "communicated" a read-only setting and could not enforce it). SD cards have them, but no USB stick I ever saw had one. Why? Such a switch on a digital device can really enforce the read-only setting.

Just one example of a thumb drive with a write-protect switch - http://www.imation.com/en-us/Imation-Products/USB-Flash-Drives--Accessories/Clip-Flash-Drive/

I think you're looking for this PDF. Oh, and I found a web page with a long list of links. It's here. Some days it seems like that website has everything.

I have had 2 fail on me within the last year. The first was a Corsair Survivor http://www.corsair.com/products/survivor/default.aspx Was a pretty rough and tumble device but I guess it couldn't stand pottery dust. Within 4-5 months Windows nor Mac would recognize the drive. I kept a backup of it and called Corsair. They were very cool about it and asked that I return it. I sent it back and received a replacement for the drive within a few business days of them receiving it. I want to say that it was sent back to me via UPS Second Day. The drive itself wasn't handled to roughly so I have my doubts that it wasn't just a hardware problem from the start. Second one that is on its' way to failing is an Imation Clip Drive http://www.imation.com/en/Imation-Products/USB-Flash-Drives--Accessories/Clip-Flash-Drive/. It is intermitantly failing to transfer files. I ran a version of Portable Apps http://portableapps.com/ and am also starting to see the Imation have a few problems. I'll probably not get the clip flash again because dust and dirt gets into the rubber boot and falls into the USB sheeth.
I work in an environment that can get pretty dirty, http://www.hlchina.com/ But what should I expect from a pottery. On the positive side, i've had about 3-4 SD cards that I transfered over from my Palm Zire that are now being used in the wife's camera and they refuse to die.

They did already. The difference is that you get a whole new hard drive all at once, rather than swapping platters in and out like you do with a floppy.

The Imation DiscStakka, I've been hoping they come out with a 1000 disc holder w/ Reader built in

But currently each unit only holds 100 discs, which can be stacked in 5's, It comes with a nice indexing software, although the units have to eject the CD & have you put it into your computers CD or DVD rom drive as there is no built in reader.
Here's the link http://www.imation.com/products/disc_stakka/index. html

The Imation DiscStakka, I've been hoping they come out with a 1000 disc holder w/ Reader built in

But currently each unit only holds 100 discs, which can be stacked in 5's, It comes with a nice indexing software, although the units have to eject the CD & have you put it into your computers CD or DVD rom drive as there is no built in reader.
Here's the link http://www.imation.com/products/disc_stakka/index. html

Maybe something like this might be what you are looking for....

http://www.imation.com/products/disc_stakka/index. html

- Stack units up to five high to create a tower that holds up to 500 discs without any extra cabling or rebooting your computer.
- Connect towers using powered USB hubs to control over 100 towers (that's over 50,000 discs) from a single computer.

Actually, the most annoying one I saw recently was on Imation's web site. It's from their "Business Select" line of media, which they describe as a "high quality digital storage solution". Right. It's a writable DVD thank you.

Looks like Verbatim and Imation already have their LightScribe DVDs out.

Nice try bud, but it's obvious you're an Imation SuperDisk engineer. Now where's that ZIP engineer lurking...

I remember all the technologies out there like Imation SuperDisk or Castlewood Orb. I used to be rooting for the Orb drive to win the market and become the standard. At the time (1999) I think it could have been a killer product. It used hard-drive-type platters in a reasonably sized cartridge, with a 2.2 GB disk going for about $20. Also, reviews said that the drives were a lot faster than Zip disk.

But now, like you said, with CD burners and their media being so cheap and decently quick, plus the addition of Mt. Rainier to the RW drives, Zip clones have no more reasons to hang around. And from what I've heard, Iomega can't even get CD drives right.

Since the site is only spitting up "Sorry can't allow you access today" now, I have to assume you're referring to an old 8cm player that played full-sized discs with them hanging out the side. I always wanted one of them, but I'll have to make do with my Imation RipGo! which, while it won't play 12cm discs, is also a USB CD burner and MP3 player...

What about the 120MB super drive?

Ahem.

It's a station wagon full of backup tapes. 20GB Travan tapes are about the size of a cigarette pack.

While I'm not personally familar with how many cigaratte packs you can fit into a station wagon, I would imagine it's several hundered, if not a few thousand.

What's your cutoff point?

What about dataplay, 500MB in the size roughly of a quarter. Very neat, but i think they ended up filing for bankruptcy over competition with flash cards and hard drive based mp3 players. I think even Britney Spears was scheduled to release an album using this technology.

CD-ROM isn't a random-access read-write medium. Even packet-mode CD-RW will never be an adequate replacement for random-access r/w media.

CD-RW or DVD+RW drives which support Philips' Mount Rainier specification can be treated just like a floppy. The standard has been out for about a year and a half, but there are very few compatible drives in existence (HP DVD+RW, Teac and Yamaha CD, there may be others by this time), but AFAIK, Windows does not support it in the OS, though there is a kernel patch for Linux support.

An 8cm form factor DVD+RW (announced a month or two ago) with Mount Rainier support would be perfect companion for a sub-notebook. Something like the Imation RipGo! recast as a DVD+RW would be OK too. 1.4GB (less ~25% overhead for the Mt. Rainier filesystem) on something that works like a floppy would be very nice.

In the current political climate, every time I see a new optical technology proposed, I become suspicious that it's going to turn out to be an avenue for the introduction of new hardware DRM, i.e. if you want our shiny new storage medium, you must accept reduced utility.

Time will tell, I guess.

• 120MB storage
• drive reads regular floppies
• 5x transfer speed form regular floopies

it's a shame that it never caught on (critical-mass) wise. but it's a great technology that really should be standarized and widely used as a floppy replacement.

In all my systems (I put together my own), I have been putting in LS-120 drives instead of straight floppy drives. That way I can still boot floppies on the rare instance I need to, and I have a removable media drive that isn't completely useless the rest of the time.

The only problem is that I can't really use it to install OS's, as there's usually a mid-stage (between BIOS access and fully installed OS access) where they expect to see something on the motherboard's floppy connector rather than an ATA drive. With OS's on CD's these days, that isn't a big problem.

I don't think I'd accept a system that had no kind of writeable removable-media access at all. But a CD-ROM burner would probably be sufficient for most uses. If not that, then it should at least have a ZIP or LS-120 drive.

A friend burns CDs like there's some sort of deadline. I've only just got myself a CD burner. Maybe if I downloaded MP3s through work I might run out of space a bit faster, but the 20gig I mentioned at the top of this comment is an IDE drive in a removable bay with a USB connection. If I need more storage I just buy another cheap drive and another tray.

At work, and I am fairly new here so I might get this wrong, we currently have about 6Gig of network storage for students which is more or less full, but our solution is simply to have Zip drives in every PC. Students have a quota and really their data is their own problem. Staff have 30Gig to play with and 5 is still free. And 9 of that is a backup of the Ghost images of the student labs that I made when I arrived.

Speaking of backups, it's been my experience that hard drive space is useless without the same amount of backup space available. DDS3 tapes only go up to something like 12/24 Gig if they haven't changed in a year or so, meaning that cheap and easy backup really ends at 20Gig. Personally, my 20Gig hard drive is more or less the backup, with data burnt to CD the same time it's moved from my portable's 4Gig to the 20Gig drive. But burning CDs isn't the best solution for stuff that changes frequently. (Although it seems to be the best option for Mac-oriented graphics designers who have to live in an otherwise PC-only corporate enviroment.)

My interest in retro gaming also probably helps keep my storage requirements low. Recently I burnt an 8Mbyte Dreamcast image that had an Atari 2600 emulator and over 100 (Public Domain) ROMs.

And I mean, who needs 120TB of random access storage? Seriously. I mean, sure it's nice to be able to skip instantly to a particular chapter of a movie, but how often do you do it, really? And the "Random" button on any given MP3 player is fun, but if you had to listen to the tracks in a particular order it wouldn't be the end of the world (imagine a DDS3 MP3 player - that's 12 days of music, solid, and it would probably be able to be smaller than the original Sony Walkman).

Wow, that was a long post.

Sigh. I've never even HEARD of eMag. I doubt that they are the last maker of 9-track tapes. IMATION seems to still sell them.

Hm, this story again.

Aren't these guys still making their own tapes?

Sony Digital Relay: full-size CD, 650 MB, under 1 pound, 3 hour battery life, $250
Imation RipGO!: mini-CD, 185 MB, 8 ounces, 5 hour battery life, $400

Both: USB (4x / 4x / 6x max), WMA, MP3, CDDA.

Apple iPod: hard drive, 5 GB, 6 ounces, 10 hour battery life, $400

iPod: FireWire ( 32x ), MP3, VBR, WAV, AIFF.
(Firmware upgradable to future formats. Built-in video games. Charges over FireWire.)

From the Imation site it sounds like you don't have to hobble the files. " * Record six hours WMA-quality music or three hours of MP3 in less than five minutes." It also sounds like it doesn't do the encoding either - just transfers files from computers.

Amongst common uses of the parallel port besides the standard of printers, there are lots of other devices that attach to them, like scanners and Imation's SuperDisk, which is a device like a ZIP-drive, but that can store 120 MB (maybe newer versions support more). I'm sure you can find other common uses, like control of cars and other electronic devices -- kids do it a lot, controlling something like a car or an electronic arm connected to the parallel port with the adequate software.

I'm a confused consumer. Imation better sue Apple...

• weighs less
• costs less
• stores slightly less
• let's you delete crap pictures