At work, in order to do some testing, two of our engineers ordered a half-dozen 128-MB USB "memory sticks". When the testing was complete, everyone in the department "inherited" one - at least, until the next round of testing.

I was planning to buy one of my own, but over Xmas an alternative occurred to me. My niece got a portable MP3 player, which has 64 Mb of built-in storage, doubles as a voice recorder and FM receiver, and takes additional memory cards up to 512 Mb. As near as I can tell (she didn't get the extra memory card) the computer simply recognizes this as two removable drives. You can store about a dozen tunes to the built-in memory, and then you should be able to use the memory card as an extra drive to store as much personal data as you have room for. (The SD cards themselves are tiny, as others have pointed out, and can also be used with other devices apparently.)

Downsides
- it's larger than a USB stick, but not by much.
- the memory card can't be used without the player (or other ancillary device)
- it needs a battery to operate (I assume)
- probably more expensive
- your kids will want to borrow it unless you get them (each) one of their own (see point # 4 above) <img src="images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" />

Upsides
- in keeping with our usual board philosophy, it does more than one thing
- can purchase multiple replacement storage devices to hold more stuff in less space (a second SD drive takes up less space than a second USB stick)

Be careful with your terms here, "Memory stick" is a Sony propritary flash technology and is not USB compatible, so there is no such thing as a "USB memory stick" . I see that name used a lot in group's and it seems to confuse those who have not seen memory sticks or USB flash drive. A couple of threads in groups people were thinking they were talking about USB flash card readers capable of reading Memory sticks when the USB flash drives were being talked about.
I bought my wife a Creative Nomad MuVo which is a 128M USB drive with built in mp3 player similar to what you describe except it does not have any exapnsion capability. There are several types of flash memory cards in use now, CF, SD, MMC, SmartMedia, Memory Stick, and a newer XD as well as the USB ones. You can get very small USB flash card readers which can read or write do one or more of the different flash memory types also. If your into electronic devices you can try to standardize, for example since you have an mp3player that uses SD, when you buy a digital cameraor PDA look for one that uses SD as well. I have a digicam that uses CF and I use it in a small computer system as an IDE drive so I have a few of those cards. I have an adapter that lets me read those in a PCMCIA slot as well.

Eugene: Thanks for the clarification. The engineers at work have been referring to our USB drives as "memory sticks" so I assumed that it was a generic term for USB drives.

After looking at my niece's MP3 player, I've decided to get one for myself. I looked at the MUVO but I would prefer one with the memory expansion capability, as I've found data, like a gas, tends to expand to fill the space available. <img src="images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> I'm leaning toward the RIO Sport or the RIO Cali at present. (My niece got one called the Rush, but I can't find any information on it on the web, other than it appears to be made by Philips; but it's not mentioned on the Philips web site. Strange.)

If you're looking for a smaller CD for a personal kit - and as much as I like USB keychain drives, CD-ROM's are waterproof and can be read on any system without needing drivers or access to the back of the computer, as is the case with Windows 98 for the former and many systems I encounter day-to-day for the latter.

Round Mini CD-R on Quill.com:
http://tinyurl.com/yukuf

Actually, SONY does have a USB flash drive which can read MEMORY STICKs.



SONY Microvault 128MB with Memory Stick Reader/Writer

I have a MUVO 64MB. The only thing I'd watch out for/test for with this USB memory modules is dropping them. I dropped my MUVO accidently from a height of about 2 feet. It apparently jumbled some of the electrons, and resulted in skipped playback. Once I "reformatted" the memory, and placed the songs back on, the problem went away.

With that in mind, definately go with the multiple formats. Make sure to include a plain-text version readable by any operating system. Do the same for graphics and store them in a somewhat universal format of some kinda (maybe jpeg or bitmap). For really important information (say... telephone numbers, or account numbers) you should make multiple copies. Just change the filenames.. (i.e. telnums1.txt, telnums2.txt) In the event something gets damaged, you might be still be able to put the pieces together.

FYI, Linux and Unix systems have more utilities in the "standard" distributions than do Windows as far as I know (AFAIK). (i.e. strings utility)

It would be a shame to have important documents in pdf completely unreadable because of a few byte errors. I would highly recommend the redunancy of multiple formats, at the very least, a text (.txt) file of the information, or in the case of graphics, a bitmap (.bmp) or jpeg(.jpg or .jpeg) file.

For those with a Mac, you might want to try using multiple SONY Memory Sticks in a RAID array <img src="images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

http://ohlssonvox.8k.com/fdd_raid.htm

And of course, to bring this back to a "survival" related topic - you can put two CD-ROMs back to back to form a signalling mirror <img src="images/graemlins/cool.gif" alt="" />

Yea yea smartie <img src="images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" />
Its still not a USB memory stick though, its a usb flash drive with memory stick reader/writer.
Sorry calling computer parts the correct name has become a pet peeve of mine thanks to all the people whom I've had to try to guess what they were talking about when they called their monitor a computer and called their computer a hard drive, cpu or modem, then there are the people that call 3.5" floppies "hard disks". It was always such a pain years ago when I was in the computer shop. Someone would bring in their pc telling me their hard disk wouldn't read. We would boot it up and it worked fine. Then we put in the 3.5" bootable floppy to do a virus scan and it wouldn't read the floppy so we then figured out they were one of those <img src="images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

>>My niece got a portable MP3 player, .... As near as I can tell ... the computer simply recognizes this as two removable drives.

I thought this was such a good idea I took my own advice and went out and bought one. After doing some research, I decided on the RIO Cali Sport (128 MB internal memory) plus a 256 MB SC memory card (the kind that's also used in digital cameras, it appears).

Much to my chagrin, the computer does NOT recognize this device the same as it recognizes a USB drive. I can (and did) copy wma files to it (using Windows Media Player), and can play them without a problem, but it does not show up in Explorer as an additional drive, meaning I can't read and write to it as I would a USB drive.

I'm pretty sure I wasn't imagining it - my niece's MP3 player did show up as a separate drive in Windows Explorer (actually 2 drives, d: and e:) but it appears this is not the case for all MP3 players; and, since using it as a removable storage drive is a non-standard use for it, there's no way to tell by reading the specs if it can be used this way or not.

Fwiw, the MP3 player my niece got had the brand name "Rush" and is apparently made by Philips. I can't find the particular model on the Philips web-site (or anywhere else) and, knowing my brother, I suspect they may have picked up a discontinued (or soon-to-be- ) model at a close-out sale.

So it's not as good an idea as I thought, but it's still a really cool MP3 player <img src="images/graemlins/cool.gif" alt="" />