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1GB USB Drive on a Keychain
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.)"
This stuff has been on the market for a long time. Though it is cool stuff.
Though, all I want for yule is a solid state harddrive that's as fast as ram...
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Nothing would last ten years on my key chain. If I don't lose them I break them.
Dozings.com -- Its kinda funny... If you're as crazy as me.
According to the product spec page:
67mm w/cap x 20mm x 9mm
60mm w/o cap x 20mm x 9mm
I'm not sure they have anything more than prototypes at the moment, but this is still a pretty nifty advance for people who need more storage for digital video and digital photography.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
IBM has had the same thing out now for a while... I have one.
r od uctDisplay?cntrfnbr=1&prmenbr=1&prnbr=SCC4513&cntr y=840&lang=en_US
Check out the 8mb model for $25...
http://commerce.www.ibm.com/cgi-bin/ncommerce/P
Think of the opportunities for corporate espionage with these type of things. Is there a way to disable USB mass-storage devices in XP or 2000?
I accidentally locked my drive in the car!
I am skeptical aboutthat claim. Something is needed to read and write to the drive. Plaus the line at the bottom of one of the pages:
"* Windows 98 Drivers will be available for download"
My guess is that it may use an exhisting driver, or the package you buy has one.
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
I've got one of the IBM keychain dealies. It's only 8mb, but it's actually quite handy for data transfers. My parents have a slow modem (as opposed to a fast one? anyway) at their house and no CD burner. Sometimes I have to get some work done there and the 8mb of the IBM fits all of my Excel sheets just fine.
While 8mb has been fine for the 6 months I've had the thing, of course these new releases will force me to upgrade.
On thing though, its a serious Pain In The Ass to try and plug one of these things in blind. I've got a USB hub at home, but they really aren't all that common yet.
Pete
The sole purpose of the Internet is to get porn and bomb making plans into the hands of children.
For $900 why not buy a PDA... or two? More functional, more storage space, and you're less likely to lose it. It's just ridiculous, and I don't see anybody buying it except to say, "Hey! Look what I got!"
No sig for you.
the site's a bit low on details, no? i want a bit more tech info. for example, if it's driverless, why list the three(Win32, MacOS, and Linux) OS's they "support" at all? shouldn't anything with USB drivers work? and, oh, why're they making Win32 drivers available, if it's driveress?
personally, i'll hold out for a firewire version. transfering up to 1GB at USB speeds is a bit slow for me.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
But I really don't see what it's good for. Storing lots of stuff? CD-R or CD-RW; your computer probably has a drive already, and you can stash more data than even the 1/2 GB drive. Holding encryption keys? You want something a lot smaller, cheaper and more rugged. Having something neat to put in your pocket? Okay, but that's not going to sell lots of them.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
According to their specs, this thing runs "driverless" on Win98SE, Me, 2000, XP / Mac OS 8.6 ~ 10.1 / Linux 2.4. I assume that just means you mount it and you're good to go?
One thing the specs didn't touch on was how many times the "drive" can be written to? I know that memory like this has a limited life, similar to a digital camera. I think this is a good idea, but it would be a pain to plug this thing in the BACK of the computer, just to access your work. (Yes, most computers still have the USB port in the back.)
also, it's a pity that we are so close to usb 2.0 becoming a vialbe solution. I guess speed is not that important to most people, but i would prefer a firewire or USB2 keychain drive - the cost to build one would be about the same.
So does this compete in the market with zip disks, cd-r's, floppy disks, clik! disks, and portable usb hard drives? seems like a pretty tight market to me...
Moon Macrosystems. Sun's biggest competitor.
All USB drives are "driverless" because the USB spec details the interface to a "USB Mass Storage Device". Each OS only has to implement one USB storage device driver, and then all USB drives will work on it. Linux's can be found here.
Various companies make them (flash USB key drives), they are a VERY nice solution for sneakerneting, however the reliability sometimes SUCKS (typical consumer grade, not tested before shipping).
We ordered 2 of em from a different company, one worked fine and dandy, the other had a bad connection somewhere internally and would crash the USB bus and only mount about 1/8 of the time. They were $80 each for 64 MB versions (a good price, mind you), but next time, we will only buy locally, so that returns can be much easier.
Test your net with Netalyzr
USB defines a generic storage device. A wide range of products, from actual harddrives to pseudo-drives can be used without any *additional* device drivers. This is why Win98 needs an update -- it didn't come with the generic storage device drivers.
I wonder if there's any security mechanism for these things to discourage theft and protect the data in the event of loss. Imagine how many lunch hour thieves would wander through the office pulling these things out of USB ports otherwise.
Please donate your spare CPU cycles to help fight cancer and other diseases
These are teensy little flash memory cards with USB connectors and IDE-over-USB emulation like most of today's flash-memory technologies.
The prices are the same or a smidgen higher than the same size CompactFlash, Smartmedia, Memory Stick or MMC cards.
And they've been out for more than a year, though the 512MB and 1GB models are pretty recent. The idea is they're an alternative to shuttling a small batch of files around on a Zip disk or such, or burning a CD.
As for actual hard drives, for half that $900 figure you can get a PC Card drive for your laptop that holds 5GB though like IBM Microdrives it's obviously a bit more delicate. And you can get pocket-sized 30GB Firewire and USB 2 drives for the same $400 or so these days.
What doesn't get posted to Slashdot these days? When will we be hearing about someone discovering Dim Sum? Or asking for resources on learning how to drive a stick-shift?
Sounds like a good, cynical business model--very fragile yet expensive products target-marketed to savvy techies with high disposable incomes.
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
I can already stick a cdrw in my pocket
Uninnovate - Only the finest in engineering.
M-Systems DiskOnKey seems to offer the exact same features. They're great geek gifts since they cost around $40-$50 for a 16MB version and, like this product, don't need drivers (except for win98). Works fine with MacOS9 and X and Linux.
Importantly, you could have been buying them for the last year instead of having to wait until the 20th of this month. I love mine, beats using a floppy anyday (although you'll want to get a couple USB extender cables unless you're lucky enough to have frontside USB ports).
http://www.diskonkey.com/
Fsck cluebie moderators. I'll say what I want, offtopic or not. And fsck having to qualify every bloody statement just
I guess I'll just wait till the $900 1gb model comes down in price...
Anyone remember how great the Iomega ClickDrive was supposed to be? Now its just another portable pseudo-flash medium.
--Fred
"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American Public." - H.L. Mencken
In recent Linux releases, there is a USB_STORAGE driver that can be included in the kernel; I would presume that's what they're referring to, at least vis-a-vis Linux support.
It's entirely likely that three years ago, W98 didn't include drivers for disk storage devices, thus meaning that if you want to use the device with W98, you need such a "generic driver."
Similarly, Windows NT 4 is getting pretty old; it likely didn't include support for USB storage devices either.
In a sense, this may be regarded kind of like having SCSI support. You do need a SCSI driver to access SCSI devices, but once you've got that, there's no special driver for Seagate drives as compared to Quantum or IBM...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
The 1.x linux kernel doesn't support it, either. I guess that means Linux is lagging behind. I'm as much of a linux person as anybody else here, but why beat up on M$ for not adding support for new devices to their old OS's?
1984 was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual.
Data Access Rate:
over 1MB/sec (read)
800 KB/sec (write)
So reading/writing that 1GB would take.. ummmm... forever.
I'd hate to send my portable storage device through the washing machine by accident if it's not...
I agree, an small mp3 player that had a USB port to allow connection to a 128M or 256M keyring HD would be very neat. The only problem is that the MP3 device would need to supply the power via the USB to the keyring HD. I don't see specs on power consumption, but I suspect the whole ensemble would eat batteries! Otherwise very nice.
We ARE the peat bog soldiers.
Could this at last be the end of crappy, unreliable floppy drives that haven't grown since the days of the 40 MB hard drive? Oh please, oh please, oh please . . .
Not a typewriter
However I would question the claim that other systems did have it at that time, can anybody confirm?
Is that a keychain in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?
---
Segmentation Fault ( core dumped )
You can easily disable the ability of a standard user to write to a USB device by using Group Policies. I'll have to go look it up, but there is an entry in the templates to disable seperate hardware devices. Just shut off the USB ports.
Rule of Life Number 2: Remember, it can all go to hell at any minute. --Jimmy Buffet
Grab yourself a Sandisk SDDR-31 CF reader, cut it apart. Buy a USB plug from digikey, cut off most of the cable and solder the new plug very close to the rest of the the part you ripped out. Buy yourself an IBM 340MB ($155) or a 1G ($310) microdrive. Plug it into the pins on the connector you ripped out of the CF reader.
Make yourself a cheap mold out of a little plastic container with a hole cut in the side for the USB plug to stick out of, put your electronics in it and fill it with that 2 part polymer stuff. Instant pocket 1G drive, for under $350.
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Suport Windows ME/2000/XP, Mac OS (ver. 8.6 or above) and Linux kernel version 2.4.0 or above without driver.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
You could store one hell of an encryption key on that keychain.
How many bit encryption would that be?
The Terapin Mine Handheld is under $550 from ThinkGeek and it has 10GB of space. Connectivity via USB, 10Mbps Ethernet, PCMCIA.
Also has stereo audio and (still) video out.
Why pay $900 for this when you can have so much more for less?
I don't have a solution, but I certainly admire the problem.
Today the missing drive with atomic secrets was found behind a Garfield coffee mug in an employee breakroom.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
This is very cool. But it is only one component that I need alongside my Leatherman. When they can put my 21 inch monitor on my keychain, then I'll be impressed.
-db
OK, 1GB *might* be interesting, but for smaller sizes (16-128MB), I don't see the gain over flash memory. Did I miss anything?
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
http://65.119.30.151/productimage/22-147-001-01.JP G
This is a good way to store all those 4096 bit keys with your physical ones. Just don't lose that ring!
Given one hour to live, the student replied: "I'd spend it with professor FP who can make an hour seem like a lifetime."
Anyone know if this will wokr on the 3Com Audrey? I haven't been able to find out if generic USB storage devices work on QNX...
---- I made the Kessel Run in under 11 parsecs.
I just thought of something REALLY cool :)
:)
Suppose you and a friend have sensitive data, and you ONLY want yourselves to have access to it. Here's what you do...
Get a USB hub and 2 of these, hook them both up to a linux box, then use RAID to span a partition across them. That way, you can ONLY get the information when both of you are there, and anyone wanting it would have to steal/kill both of you to get it. It makes it a bit more harder brings you that much closer to Mission Impossible
Check out my sysadmin blog!
There are USB scanners with great Linux drivers, for instance... but they're not in the majority, because every damn scanner company has to solve the "tell the scanner to scan something and give me the image back" problem with their own half-assed protocol.
This isn't just a Linux thing, too - don't you love it when, running Windows, you can just have a piece of hardware start working without you futzing around with separate driver disks? The only way that happens is when the hardware significantly predates your version of Windows (i.e. not often) or when it follows some standard that Windows already knows how to support. It's so much more fun to install a new hard drive (even internally) than, say, a new video card.
Video cards, at least, are advancing by leaps and bounds and so have an excuse for rapidly changing hardware protocols. But scanners? Webcams?
I just recently started using a DiskOnkey (the 128MB model), and it's a terrific device. They cost about $150 each, and it's about 50% longer (and about 5 or so mm wider) than the Leatherman Micra I carry on my keychain, just to give you a size idea. There are smaller devices (like the Q Drive), but the DiskOnKey is rugged as hell, and so far has stood up to quite the beating.
What's it good for? Well, in my case, I'm using it to hold a set of Windows sysadmin tools (a VNC installer, Terminal Server client software, and a few other utilities), along with a full electronic copy of my company DR plan, and a ton of policy/procedure documents. With all that, I still have room to shuttle files around as well.
In fact, it's been so handy that we're replacing our printed copies of many off-site manuals with these. That way, it's much easier to keep up-to-date, and all we need to access everything is a computer with USB support and the ability to read HTML, PDF, and Word documents.
The coolest thing I found is that they're bootable, too - I just need to put an OS on one and it's an even better toolkit. Is the storage as cost-effective as CD-ROM? Of course not - it doesn't hold nearly as much, and the 128MB device, as I mentioned, cost $150. But it's far more rugged than a CD, and can be used in all sorts of circumstances where a CD can't. Heck, even a lot of the stripped-down PCs that are used in corporate IT shops have free USB ports.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
I don't know about keychains, but a regular part of my bag is a small box (say 5 x 3 x 0.75 in) that just plugs in (via cable) into any USB port. USB 2.0 capable and all in all cost about $200. I am quite happy with it.
:-)
Eh? What? Size? Oh, it's 20 Gb
Actually, this is just a box with IDE <-> USB electronics into which you can put any standard laptop hard drive (and I put a 20Gb one in). Draws power from the USB port and is truly plug-and-play. Highly convenient. Recommended.
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
The price on the website cited for the 1G USB drive is $700, not $900.
I was wrong. Doh!
I, too, have the IBM 8MB model. First of all, its AWESOME for storing my GnuPG keyring, and my Whisper32 password file. I finally feel like I'm doing GnuPG the right way.. like the extremists keeping the floppy in their pocket, inserting it only at the moments you need it for encrypting/decrypting. Now to move my critical private files to my pure USB PC and gpg 'em. Should make for a secure, console-access file server.
For the remaining 7.8MB, I keep a bunch of small files that I would need most when I don't have my Thinkpad around -- my Notes ID file, some presentations that I've been working on for clients, and all the things I forget to save when I blow away the laptop.. the ethernet and modem drivers for one! (That's a mean catch-22) I also keep small installers that often give me trouble when downloading.. putty, AdAware spyware removal tool, Netscape 6 installer, LeetSpeak for genning passwords, Whisper32, and AIM95N.
Please people, stop comparing it to a PDA. They don't serve the same purpose at all.
Intelligent Life on Earth
Could this be used as part of a crypto key management system?
It would be killer to use something like this as a drive on a fanless PC with a tiny Linux install.
This gives a whole new meaning to, "Oh #$%!ing #$%*&! I lost my keys!
Were I to lose such a keychain, I'd be more concerned than if my car were stolen or destroyed. Goodness, my car isn't worth that.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
...a thingumbob[1] that does hardware RAID-0 on two of these things.[2] Then it's perfect.
The fact is, I've a) become really really distrustful of all built-in hard-drives, after having like three or four of them fail (in two different home computers) within a two year period, two of them being "redundant" and failing at once, and not just the controller, and, what's more, with very clean power coming in. I just don't trust anything with moving parts anymore. Truth is, one gigabyte is more than enough for everything I need except media files, which don't need to be dynamically backed up (i.e. they only need one backup EVER, which is no-problem).
Do you know what REAL security is? It's not in having a thirteen-character password with alphanumerics for root...what good is that if your file-system (hmmmm? ext2?) isn't encrypted? Anyone can break into your computer, steal your hard-drive (bad enough), then, to add insult to injury, read the bits off your partition, reconstruct all your personal files, and take up a long-distance relationship with your former girlfriend. Ouch.
Anyway, real security isn't in having a long password: it's in having your hard-drive in your pocket when you leave your home. Plus, I think it would do us all good to have to constrain ourselves to a gigabyte...it would keep me from mindlessly copying huge directory structures to three or four places as version control, or a DVD that I'll only watch two or three times a month...wow, how useful that it's on my hard-drive? or all those CD images that I tell myself make it SO much more convenient to play these games that, really, I only get an opportunity to do a few times a month, and generally just be wasteful just because I "have the space"...it comes to bite you in the end, because there's no convenient way to do a backup. If you really need to copy whole CD's to hard-drive, do it on one mounted "spare" or "media" and keep it separate from your "real" (keychain USB) drive. Now if only linux could boot off USB as I hear a mac can....
[1] that's the official word, not "thingamajig", according to my dictionary.
[2] This is probably a ten-dollar piece of equipment. How hard can RAID-0 be? All you do is double every write and read request, and if you ever get a fail on any read or or write, start chirping like mad and somehow indicate which drive gave it to you. Of course, I'd hate to be the one writing the routine for what happens when the read of the two drives returns disparate bits...maybe you do a few more reads and if the drives stubbornly disagree about the state of the bit, ask the user, in the true linux fashion [whatever the equiviliant is to "Unable to read bit 4 of byte at F332D:2AAE4:F22A." with three buttons, one labelled one, one labelled zero, one labelled retry."] then ask him/her to replace whichever is the older one...
Why does the page say that they work in recent windows and Linux 2.4 then?
I think you must have erred somewhere. I don't see two versions offered.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
I can't be bothered to look on the website, but it could be something along the lines of 'any old video card you plug into windows will boot to a 640x480x8 VGA desktop, but the drivers give you extra.' So the drivers probably give you nice names in the device manager, stuff like that, as opposed to 'Generic USB Harddrive.'
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
My Sony Clie have proggie called MS Import (MS=Memory Stick) which when running makes it
behave like USB storage device. I just put my Memory Stick card into it, run this program, plug it via
USB cable to Linux and I can mount it as SCSI drive,
having access to all my files on it. Best thing about it, is that you can have several cards.
Yes, it is bigger than keychain, but what the heck,
I carry my PDA with me all the time anyway!
Corporations will have no problem. As soon as the user plugs the device in, the DMI software will automatically send an alert to management software saying "hey, I've detected an unauthorized device on computer 123456781. I've detected it as an Optical Mass Storage Device with serial number 933322331." We'll pop open the screen for that system, get the location of the machine and pay the user a friendly visit. Of course, it's possible the user has already gotten the data and is on his way out the door.
It's the smaller shops that don't use or can't afford the management software that will have problems with this, as well as the companies that have lax desktop security standards and useless AUPs. In those cases, I suggest two-part epoxy. Epoxy the keyboard and mouse cables in (and reduce theft!), and epoxy nice sturdy plastic over the rest of the ports. Voila! With a lot of work, you can probably remove the cover to add devices or replace the mouse and keyboard, although it's probably easier cutting the cable and splicing the new one in.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
This just occured to me.. Imagine the possibilities with this USB key when Linux comes out for the Playstation 2... 1 GB of instant removable storage.
Anyone know what filesystem these keys use? It would definitely be an impressive hack if someone can get the PS2 to view it as a very big memory card. Or, vice versa, take a 8MB PS2 memory card and rig a USB adapter to it somehow for PC storage.. Just some ideas if anyone is bored..
I can only hope you are making an attempt at humor.
Ummm, Jon, aren't you supposed to be dead...? - Otter(3800)
is that some pr0n in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?
THERE IS NO DATA. THERE IS O