Posted 10/27/09 at 12:30:52 PM by Paul Lilly

The U.S. Defense Department has decided to cautiously reinstate the use of USB thumb drives and other flash storage-based media. Flash storage -- and devices which use them, including memory sticks, digital cameras, media players, PDAs, and more -- were banned last November after thousands of military computers were infected by various malware, most of which was traced back to thumb drives.

That ban will soon be lifted, at least partially. Robert Carey, chief information officer of the U.S. Navy, said in a blog post that only "authorized individuals" are likely to be given permission to use thumb drives, and even then only for "mission-essential functions." And these won't be personal drives picked up off of Newegg or Best Buy.

"The days of using personally owned flash media or using flash media collected at conferences or trade shows are long gone," Carey said.

Instead, the drives will be "government-owned and procured," and will also contain built-in encryption chips that may require both a password and a fingerprint scan to decrypt the data, among other safeguards that are yet to be worked out.

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Posted 10/01/08 at 01:25:16 PM by Paul Lilly

Corsair's popular Flash Voyager USB line reaches new heights in storage capacity today as the company announced a 64GB capacity model. According to Corsair, that's large enough to store a library of DVD-length movies and tens of thousands of high-resolution images.

"Corsair is always developing new and exciting flash products, and the 64GB USB Flash Voyager is no exception," said John Beekley, VP of Applications at Corsair. "With more storage space than most laptops, we can offer a full suite of features - whether it be backing up data, building a portable media library, or simply transporting huge amounts of data."

And if you're wondering if you can slap an OS on the new Flash Voyager, the answer is yes, you can. The large density drive is bootable, making it a potentially attractive solution for ITs and hobbyists alike.

The 64GB drive is available now with an MSRP of $250 (streets for much less), which buys the drive, preloaded security software and drivers, a bundled lanyward, USB extension cable, and a 10-year guarantee.

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Posted 08/16/06 at 04:15:25 PM by Josh Norem

The Passport Pocket is slow. Way slow. Its read speed of our 3GB test file (590 seconds) was two minutes slower than that of the PNY and the Verbatim drives, and its write speed (636 sec) was three minutes slower than the PNY. That’s just ridiculous.

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