Transcend can now focus all of its attention on putting out products rather than worrying about defending itself in court. That's because the memory maker said it has received notification from the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin that rival SanDisk has withdrawn its patent infringement lawsuit.

The suit dates back to October 2007 when SanDisk went on a suing spree, accusing 25 companies of patent infringement through three separate lawsuits. These were all companies that either made, sold, or imported USB flash drives and other memory related products.

SanDisk had sought both damages and a permanent exclusion order from the International Trade Commission (ITC) banning importation of the products in the U.S.

It's unclear whether SanDisk dropped its patent suit against all 25 companies or just Transcend.

We're expecting big things from the USB 3.0 spec, but that doesn't mean it's time to write USB 2.0's obituary. Case in point: Corsair today just unleashed a new family of flash USB drives -- Flash Voyager GTR -- designed for the USB 2.0 interface.

The biggest feature of the new flash drive family is the quad-channel architecture. According to Corsair, this makes it possible to reach read speeds up to 34MB/s and write speeds up to 28MB/s. Corsair says these are real-world figures too, as demonstrated by the company's in-house testing "against a major competitor's 128GB 'fast' flash drive."

"As we continue to digitize the sights, sounds, movies, and business of our everyday lives, we need better and better ability to transport our data and access it quickly," stated John Beekley, VP of Technical Marketing at Corsair. "The Flash voyager GTR combines to the best features of a USB flash drive and the performance of an external hard drive to provide the ultimate data portability tool."

In addition to 128GB, the new drive series will also be available in 32GB and 64GB capacities. No word yet on price.

What do you carry on your USB stick? Plans for world domination? Love letters from your mistress? Detroit Lions fan club information and links? Whether you're prone to any of these or simply aspiring to be a secret agent man, Corsair's Flash Padlock 2 USB flash drive might be just the tool you've been looking for.

This 8GB USB key sits in the sweet spot of 'put-it-in-your-pocket' storage, but unlike most other flash drives, this one comes "very cleverly and comprehensively designed to protect your critical business or personal data from unwanted exposure." This "clever" design entails a numeric PIN pad, which you can configure with anywhere from 4-10 digits. Adding a second layer of protection, the Padlock 2 boasts 256-bit AES encryption.

But what happens if you forget your PIN? Corsair says you can reset the drive to its factory default state, securely erasing all your data in the process.

This one's available now for $55 shipped.

Mushkin doesn't make the headlines too often, but the high-end memory maker this week announced one more addition to its Blackline series, the Blackline 4GB DDR3-2000 kit.

The new dual-channel kit sports Mushkin's now-familiar Blackline Frostbyte heatspreaders, but it's what's under the aluminum that counts. Mushkin rates its memory modules at 2000MHz with fairly tight 7-10-8-27 latencies at 1.65V.

This ranks as Mushkin's fastest DDR3 kit to date, although not the fastest on the market, and also the company's tightest-timed 2000MHz kit.

Mushkin says the new kit will be available soon for $180.