It sure beats floppies... or punch cards!

I got one of these SanDisk Cruzer Micro 512 MB flash drives as a gift this past holiday season. If you're not familiar with this item, it is a portable data storage unit which can be used to transport files between computers, a handy thing to have if you use more than one computer, like at home and at work, or when visiting friends or relatives.

I've been around computers long enough to remember a lot of past methods of acomplishing this:

* Punch cards. The method of transferring data in the good ol' days. If you tripped and dropped a whole deck of them, you were in for the computerized version of "52 Pickup". Strips of punched paper tape were also sometimes used.

* Magnetic tape. The big mainframe computers used reel-to-reel, while early home computers used cassettes. You hit the "Record" button, typed the command to save, waited a half hour or so for the 16 kilobytes of data in memory to be recorded on tape in R2D2-ish beeps and boops, then later you typed the command to load, hit "Play", and waited a half hour to find an error message indicating that the darn thing failed to load correctly.

* Floppy disks. When I started using them around 1979, they were 5 1/4", single sided, single density, and held about 140K of data, an advance over the bulkier, clumsier 8" disks that had an even smaller capacity (the rule in data storage units seems to be that the smaller they get physically, the more data they hold). Blank ones cost five bucks each. Over time, they got cheaper and increased their carrying capacity; by the end of the reign of the floppy they were 3 1/2" in size, less fragile (and less "floppy", though they were still called "floppies" anyway), and held almost a megabyte and a half. That was a great advance, but they were still inadequate for the bloated multimedia files that were coming into common use.

* Removable high-capacity disk packs. In the '80s and '90s, several brands of these came into use for archiving and file transfer. SyQuest disks were bulky disk platters that held 40 megabytes or so, and about 15 years ago they were commonly used to take desktop publishing documents into production. Later, Zip drives became ubiquitous, offering about 100 megabytes of storage in a compact cartridge. You still needed to have the right sort of drive in the destination computer you were transferring the file to.

* Rewritable CD-ROMs. These have pretty much made all the other forms of disk storage obsolete; practically every computer has at least a CD reader, if not a writer, so if you put files on a CD you can get at them anywhere. Capacity is around 600 megabytes, but they're not reuseable; once you fill one up you can't use it again on other files.

* Network transfers. Within an office or home LAN, with computers directly connected to one another, this is the main way people send files. Outside a local network, though, doing network transfers requires access to an FTP server or other remote method of file transfer, and may be slow depending on your Internet connection bandwidth.

But now you have another choice. Flash drives are very compact items, much smaller than a floppy disk or CD-ROM; this one is about two inches long and three-quarters of an inch wide. It comes with a lanyard so you can wear it around your neck; perhaps that's a "geek fashion statement" these days. It plugs into a standard USB port, which almost all computers have these days, and it holds 512 megabytes (half a gigabyte) in reuseable storage.

I had no problem connecting it to both my home and work computers, which run Windows XP. I haven't tried it with other operating systems, but it's supposed to support Windows 98SE, 2000, and MP, and MacOS 9.1.x+ and OS X 10.1.2+. In XP, at least, it was effortless; you just plug it in the port and it shows up immediately as a disk drive on the system, without any annoying prompts to install drivers as sometimes happens when you put in a new piece of hardware for the first time.

I did have a little difficulty the first time I tried to use the software that comes on it for encrypting files, intended to use to put confidential things like your list of passwords in a place where anybody who gets their hands on your flash drive can't access them, but it's conveniently accessible to you. When I tried to run this program on my system at work, it kept quitting on me with an error message saying the drive was no longer available, even though it was still in place and accessible for normal non-encrypted file transfers. However, I later succeeded in setting up that program at home, and next time I brought it to work it ran fine there too.

Another reviewer here has complained about the slow speed of file transfers to and from this unit. I experienced much better performance myself; when I tried transferring a 102 megabyte file from the SanDisk to my computer's desktop, it took 13 seconds. Although USB 2.0 can theoretically get even faster transfers than this, it's still better than the other reviewer experienced, and fast enough not to be an intolerable delay; you can copy the entire 512 MB contents of the SanDisk in about a minute at this speed.

Anyway, this is an item you can carry with you everywhere, so the files you're working on are always at your fingertips. It's a clever little gadget.