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1GB USB Drive on a Keychain

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the portable-pr0n dept.

sparcv9 writes "JMTek looks to be about ready to release a line of keychain-sized USB drives, ranging in capacity from 16MB to 1GB. The 1GB models are a bit pricey at almost $900US, but the 16, 32 and 64MB models are all under $100. These devices require no external power supply, claim a data retention of 10 years, and are 'driverless' -- which means that the drives will work under Linux, according to JMTek (see the 'Operating Systems' row in the specs table.)"

3 of 274 comments (clear)

  1. Smoking by Llama+Keeper · · Score: 1, Troll

    Look Mom its my MP3 collection on my keychain... DOH I dropped it in the crapper.... well whats $900 between friends anyway.

    --


    Rule of Life Number 2: Remember, it can all go to hell at any minute. --Jimmy Buffet
  2. However... by anticypher · · Score: 1, Troll

    Note that these drives only work on micro~1.oft's version of USB.

    There is a spec for USB Mass Storage Device, but M$ does not support it. In fact, any USB device manufacturer who wants access to M$'s proprietary USB storage API libraries has to agree not to support the MSD in any of their products (under normal circumstances, that would be illegal abuse of a monopoly position).

    The USB world (i.e. mostly taiwanese and chinese manufacturers) is neatly divided into two camps. About 90% make M$ proprietary USB products, the remaining 10% make products that correspond to the official USB spec. If you have a clued-in taiwanese computer shop in your area, you can get them to order USB compliant devices instead of M$ proprietary shit.

    These little drives work on some Macs as well, since Apple licensed the micro~1.oft USB drivers and APIs, so they could take advantage of the market force M$ has dominated. The proprietary USB license adds between $2 and $3 to the end price of each macintosh.

    If you want to have some fun, plug a USB/MSD compatible hard drive into an XP machine. Although XP claims to have no knowledge of the Mass Storage Device specification, there is enough of a driver for windoze to reformat the drive with an NT5FS file system. As a bonus, it doesn't even bother asking the user, it just reformats, every single time.

    the AC

    --
    Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
  3. Re:These have been out forever... by Nullsmack · · Score: 0, Troll

    Yeah I trust a company that misspells Plug-N-Play on their front page..

    (it's "Pulg-N-Play" on there.

    .