A Keychain Never Forgets

If you’re like many frustrated business travelers, you’ve probably been

trying to shed some of the paraphernalia you carry through airport security. For

me, the once-indispens able piece of gear that I now routinely leave at home is

my laptop computer.

Carrying a laptop has always been problematic in airports: While you’re

struggling with your wristwatch and cell phone or, these days, your belt and

shoes, your computer is scooting down the conveyor toward parts–and people–unknown.

I tried giving mine up a couple of years ago without much success. While I found

I could handle most of my e-mail over a cell phone, BlackBerry pager, or

wireless handheld, I never figured out how to carry all the files and data I

need for day-to-day business.

Now there’s a way. It’s called keychain memory. A dozen or so

manufacturers have come out with these pocket-size pods of flash memory, the

same kind of semiconductor memory used in digital cameras and MP3 players. They

snap into the USB port of any PC or Macintosh computer, where they act like just

another hard drive. When it’s time to move on, you drag and drop your work–PowerPoint

presentations, Word documents, music files, and digital movies or photos–into

the portable memory, unplug it, and off you go. It’s just like the good old

days when you’d slip a floppy disk in your pocket to carry your work from

office to home and back. Trouble is, my laptop no longer has a floppy drive. And

even if it did, many of today’s data files are too big to fit on a

1.4-megabyte floppy.

I’ve been carrying a couple of these gizmos around for a month now, and I’m

hooked. They’re a bit on the pricey side, but the cost drops with every new

entry to the market. That’s enough for several PowerPoint files, a CD’s

worth of MP3 tunes, or the equivalent of a roll of high-quality snapshots. Need

more? A 128 meg model costs $100 to $130, depending on the brand, 1 gigabyte

will set you back a cool $700.

Although they all work pretty much the same way, my favorite is the DiskOnKey

from M-Systems, the market leader. This one, which looks like a stubby

highlighter pen, probably because of the translucent color band around its

middle, comes with the key ring that gave the category its name as well as a

clip so that you can carry it in your, um, pocket protector. To use it, pop off

the top, exposing the USB connector. Plug that into the now-ubiquitous USB port

on a PC or Mac and the computer will recognize it automatically. A tiny light on

the device comes on to show that it’s connected and flashes when you’re

transferring data. Other makes, such as USBDrive from JMTek and ThumbDrive from

Trek 2000 International, work similarly.

I’ve also been playing with the newest one on the market, SanDisk’s

Cruzer. Here’s a twist: You can upgrade it. The housing, about the size and

shape of a Zippo lighter, holds a conventional postage-stamp-size SD memory

card, so you can move up in capacity as the price of flash memory comes down.

One problem is that it’s slightly bigger than the others, and its squarish

shape can get in the way if you try to connect it to a crowded USB hub. It comes

with a short cable to solve that problem.

If you’re a real memory hog, you can try Toshiba’s 5-gigabyte hard drive

for about $350. The credit-card-size drive is designed to slip into a PC Card

slot. While those are common on portable computers, you’ll need a PC Card

reader should you want to swap material with a desktop computer. However, just

like the USB devices, Toshiba’s PC Card drive is self-installing so that you

can use it on anyone’s machine. There are cheaper ways to keep your must-have

data handy without lugging a laptop. You can write it on a Zip disk and hope to

find a matching drive at the other end of your trip. You can burn it on a CD,

but try fitting that in your pocket. For my money, I’m sold on the keychain

gadgets. If only they were a little bigger so they wouldn’t get lost in my

bag.

By Larry Armstrong in BusinessWeek. Copyright 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc