Nifty Breakthrough for USB Flash Drives

I accidentally discovered a new breakthrough in USB thumbdrive technology from Crucial memory. I was ordering some memory from them and they had an offer for a free 1GB Gizmo Jr drive. I wasn't really interested because most 1GB drives have dropped so far in price that they are practically "disposable". What did I need another thumbdrive for? We have a box full of them that we hand out when someone needs one.

Well, once the package arrived, I was stunned to find...

...the smallest, neatest, most impressive little thumbdrive I'd ever had to squint at to see. The pictures don't do it justice. It is about the size of 1/4 of a stick of gum or a small bandaid.

Rather than having a metal connector like you are used to seeing, the Gizmo Jr is just the little white part you see inside the connector. Contacts on the bottom will touch the electrical contacts on your USB connection. I was able to connect to USB 1.0 and 2.0 connections and the drive worked fine. The trickiest part is figuring out which way to point the thing because, unlike with a regular connector, there isn't just one way to put it in. Either way, you have a 50% chance of getting it right and you can tell with XP right away that you have a connection and the drive has been discovered.

Everything else works just like any other thumbdrive, in terms of using it with your computer, it is just the thing is SO small, has a usable capacity, and works without a real USB connector!

The device has a small hole on the non-business end which you can click a small chain on that comes with it. The biggest problem I see (pun intended), is that the thing is so small, I'm much more likely to loose it. The other possible downside is that for older computer folks, as soon as you say the there are 3 models, the 1GB Gizmo Jr., 2GB Gizmo Jr, or 4GB Gizmo Jr, they start reminiscing about how they used to write entire database systems for businesses with 500 employees on computers that took up entire rooms and that system only had a 32MB hard drive... Again, something worth putting up with (you can probably out run the old dudes, anyway). They are also priced aggressively at about $7.99, $12.49, and $20.99 each when purchased directly from Crucial.

Highly recommended for your next USB thumbdrive (plus, they are so cheap you can afford to give your kid your clunky old full-size 2GB thumb and buy yourself the tiny little 4GB model).