At first glance, Trek's ThumbDrive http://www.usbdrive.com appears ready to capture the hearts and minds of computer users everywhere.
At a time when almost every piece of software introduced must be Web-related, and new software is more often than not version 6.0 of a 10-year old product, there seems to be a void in software design for the early 2000s.
Not so with hardware. It seems every time I turn around something new, cool, and gotta-have is being introduced. Nowhere is this more evident that in Trek's ThumbDrive.
Yes, Trek's external storage device, ThumbDrive, is really no bigger than a thumb, weighs less than 30 grams, and offers up to 256MB storage capacity. To connect it to your computer, you simply plug it into a USB port.
Drivers for the USB controller and ThumbDrive are found on a floppy disk, along with a low-level formatting program that's required during the installation process.
Installation is simple, and is helped along by onscreen prompts. The ThumbDrive works with Windows 98 and 98 SE and, while some of the company's promotional material indicates that the drive is compatible with the Mac OS, inserting it into my G3 produced an error message that a driver was needed for the device. None is currently available.
To make using a ThumbDrive easier, it helps if your computer has a front-mounted USB port, such as Sony's VAIO Digital Studio models, or if you're using a hub such as Belkin's four-port model.
Prominent installation of ThumbDrive not only permits easy access but also gives you a view of its activity light. As with a "real" drive, you must wait until that light quits blinking before the unit is removed from the USB port. A small slide switch at the rear of the ThumbDrive turns write-protect on or off. OK, so it's not an actual hard drive, and is really more similar to a flash-memory card. In a real-world comparison to a SanDisk Compact flash, a 30MB block of files transferred in 1 minute and 35 seconds to both kinds of media.
The 32MB ThumbDrive I tested costs $129. The prices of other models are $69 (16MB), $199 (64MB), and $399 (128MB.). A 256MB will be available by the time you read this, but no price has been set. A 128MB ThumbDrive costs more than a 250MB Zip drive and several cartridges.
In fact, you can purchase a 2.2GB external Orb drive and a cartridge for $279. Zips have a cost per-megabyte of 66 cents, the Orb is 13 cents, and a 128MB ThumbDrive comes in at $3.12 per megabyte. However, a 32MB CompactFlash card is $99, so making the comparison to the $129 price tag for the 32MB model I tested not as onerous.
Trek's ThumbDrive is an amazing technology demonstration. About the size of a Sony Memory Stick--only thicker--the ThumbDrive provides a simple way for mobile computer operators to store data. But the capacity and cost of this portability make it better suited for a niche application rather than something that the average computer user can economically put to work.
-Joe Farace
