Datamind Thumbdrive

How much can you store on a floppy disk? Actually, perhaps a better question nowadays is: how little can you store on a floppy disk? It may have seemed extravagant in the 3.5in drive's Eighties heyday, but today, 1.44Mb is barely enough to hold a few modern documents.

What's needed is a new high-capacity removable storage standard: something compact, cheap and able to work in all computers. So, is the ThumbDrive befitting of such description? Yes, mostly...

Yes, it's the size of a thumb, but strictly speaking it's not a drive. It's actually a solid-state memory card with a twist. Ingeniously, tacked on to the end of the ThumbDrive is a USB connector. Installation - if you can call it that - is a matter of plugging it into a USB port and installing the driver from a floppy disk.

Once in place, it appears to Windows like any other disk drive. Files can be dragged and dropped to and fro, deleted, zipped, whatever. Being solid-state, copy operations are swift indeed and the only visible sign of activity is a small LED which flashes as data is transferred. When you're done, just unplug the ThumbDrive, pop it in your pocket and off to the next destination.

But it's not all sweetness and light. We said at the outset that the floppy disk's big problem is its small capacity, but at least it's cheap. The ThumbDrive is available in capacities ranging from 16Mb to an impressive 256Mb - but at a cost. The most basic model comes in at just under seventy quid while the top-of-the-range choice carries a staggering £659 price-tag; so you'll be left with plenty of room in your pockets to transport your chosen ThumbDrive.

Despite the decidedly amateur-looking box and literature, the ThumbDrive proves that good things can come in small packages. Want one? Start saving... Contact
Datamind: 0800 970 1416, www.thumbdrive.org.uk

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