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I use a Lexar JumpDrive. It is a USB drive with an encryption package that allows me to carry my passwords with me.

I comes with Machintosh and Windows software. No linux support (rats).

Well not much bigger than a postage stamp is Compact Flash. Just two days ago Lexar Media announced their 8 gig line of cards.

Available in May.

Seems that future digicams won't need a compact flash anymore!

Get your hard drives out of my portable devices. Devices with no moving parts are infinitely better than any that have them. Drives have the following disadvantages:

(1) Poor battery life
(2) Disk spin up time
(3) Shock / impact problems and drive crashes

You can get 4GB solid state compactflash cards right now (as recently announced by Lexar). They're merely expensive. Expend effort bringing the cost of those down and the market for 4GB mini hard drives will evaporate.

How come no one ever mentions 4GB compact flash cards. It's sad to see so many "Slashdotters" who think it's still 2002.

No need! You could just use a nice shiny 4GB Compact Flash card.

See here

For the dongle drives, you have to consider the following: A lot of them 'support' USB 2.0 but only work at USB 1.1 speeds. If the drive reads and writes in the range of 4-6 megaBYTES/s then it is a true USB 2.0 drive. My Lexar Jumpdrive 2.0 Pro 256 MB is true USB 2.0. I love this tiny thing and I would definitely buy one again. But it is annoying to crawl around to the back of my desktop and plug it in.

Of course the downside with dongle drives is you can't upgrade them. You could get yourself something like a JumpDrive Trio into which you can install and swap MMC cards, Secure Digital cards and Sony Memory Sticks. This gives you dongle functionality and size upgradeability. Honestly I don't like fumbling around with little flash cards so I did not buy one of these.

A downside to both of these things is that for win98 machines you need a special driver installed (that won't fit on one floppy) to access the drive. But otherwise they are plug'n'play compatible over WinME, Win2k, XP, MacOS X and maybe Linux, I have not tried it.

And no, I don't work for Lexar Media.

For the dongle drives, you have to consider the following: A lot of them 'support' USB 2.0 but only work at USB 1.1 speeds. If the drive reads and writes in the range of 4-6 megaBYTES/s then it is a true USB 2.0 drive. My Lexar Jumpdrive 2.0 Pro 256 MB is true USB 2.0. I love this tiny thing and I would definitely buy one again. But it is annoying to crawl around to the back of my desktop and plug it in.

Of course the downside with dongle drives is you can't upgrade them. You could get yourself something like a JumpDrive Trio into which you can install and swap MMC cards, Secure Digital cards and Sony Memory Sticks. This gives you dongle functionality and size upgradeability. Honestly I don't like fumbling around with little flash cards so I did not buy one of these.

A downside to both of these things is that for win98 machines you need a special driver installed (that won't fit on one floppy) to access the drive. But otherwise they are plug'n'play compatible over WinME, Win2k, XP, MacOS X and maybe Linux, I have not tried it.

And no, I don't work for Lexar Media.

I own a Lexar JumpDrive and love it. Mine is the older 128M, USB 1.1 version, but they now have the 1G, USB 2.0 version now as well. It's stylish and compact, plus you don't need any additional hardware to read from it, just plug it in the port. I love mine. I don't use my Iomega Zip drive at all anymore. I've not had any experience trying to boot off of USB as my BIOS doesn't support it, but Linux sees the drive itself and it works terrific. I'd imagine that if you can find a BIOS that boots USB, the 1G version would be perfect for carrying around a portable version of linux.

That is why I got a USB dongle drive for my iBook. I have 256 MB in something that won't breed bad sectors like rabbits and take up hordes of space in my laptop bag. And that 6 MByte/s read is very nice as well.

I don't know, I have a few IO-Data and Lexar memory sticks for my Clie.

One thing to do to speed up Compact Flash is to get a Firewire CF drive. It will not bring it up to Flash drive speed, but the limiting speed will be the card, and not the interface.