September 23, 2004
From Storage, a New Fashion
By MICHEL MARRIOTT
OWARD the end of the latest Tom Cruise thriller, "Collateral," the story's action turns on the performance of a player new to most movie audiences. For a suspense-charged moment Mr. Cruise and his co-star, Jamie Foxx, are upstaged by a silvery finger of portable storage technology.
In recent months, these slender solid-state memory chips - known by many names, but officially U.S.B. flash drives - have increasingly been seen blinking from the ports of computers in classrooms and libraries, conference rooms and offices, coffee shops and airport lounges.
And when the devices, which can cost less than a music CD, are not being used to store or retrieve data, they often dangle from key chains and backpacks - or even from the necks of users - as if pendants signifying a cult of convenient computing. Some are built discreetly into pens or wristwatches; a maker in the Far East is now marketing them in the form of lipstick tubes. "It's such an easy technology," said David K. Helmly, senior business development manager for digital video and video imaging of Adobe Systems, who keeps one in his pocket, another inside a pen and sometimes another on a lanyard around his neck. "I'm a total believer in the technology."
Portable hard drives and high-capacity storage devices like Jaz and Zip drives came before it, but the flash drive has changed the equation.
Mr. Helmly, for example, has largely stopped lugging a laptop from office to office, or to his home in Annapolis, Md., because he can tuck away what he needs on a flash drive that is extremely lightweight.
In some cases, flash drives have suddenly become so commonplace that, as with cellphones, their owners are adding fashion touches to lend them a personal identity. Many are being made in iPod-ish ivory and a range of candy colors; lots are as shiny as new spoons.
"Anything you wear around your neck becomes jewelry," said Ellen Lupton, director of the master of fine arts program in graphic design at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and the curator of contemporary design at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York.
And wear it around her neck is what she does. "A lanyard comes with them," Ms. Lupton said. "You're going to wear it, and if you're going wear it you want it to be cool. Why hide it?" To hers, she has added a wrap of decorative tape. "People really comment on it because they think it looks nice," she said.
Sales of U.S.B. flash drives - also referred to as thumb drives or jump drives, among other names - have tripled over the last year, and the U.S.B. Flash Drive Alliance, a trade group created last year to promote their use, has projected that they will be the leading removable solid-state storage format by next year, surpassing Secure Digital cards and memory sticks. Some 67 million to 120 million of the drives are expected to be shipped worldwide in 2005, said Steffen Hellmold, president of the alliance. Web-Feet, a research firm, forecasts that the worldwide market for U.S.B. flash drives will reach $4.5 billion in 2006 and $5.5 billion in 2007.
"It's huge," Mark Rogers, business development manager for Verbatim, a maker of a range of flash drives, from a 32-megabyte model that cost about $20 to its two-gigabyte, $500 Store 'n' Go Pro drive.
"It was so small before last year it was under the radar," he said. "Then all of a sudden people starting taking notice."
Not least among the factors in the demand for such storage devices has been the escalation in file sizes of everything from digital photos to PowerPoint presentations. And unlike burning a CD, using a flash drive is a simple drop-and-drag operation.
Other makers are also, not surprisingly, bullish on their products. Mike Wong, a spokesman for SanDisk, said U.S.B. flash drives are "the floppy disks of the 21st century - they are an extension of our handbags, our pockets."
But flash drives are much more capable than the old plastic disks, said Allen Leibovitch, program manager for semiconductor research at IDC, a research firm in Mountain View, Calif.
He notes that floppy disks, or diskettes, which not so long ago were as ubiquitous as computer mice, are seldom able to store more than 1.4 megabytes of data and are notoriously slow in writing data. On the other hand, U.S.B. flash drives commonly store from 32 megabytes to 2 gigabytes, which is equal to 2,048 megabytes. Flash memory is a semiconductive material, without moving parts, that can retain and erase information.
And while makers concede that speeds can vary, some of the drives can write and retrieve data as quickly as the speediest mechanical hard drives in computers. But mostly, the allure is in the size.
"It's just very easy to hand it across the table rather than trying to figure out how to network two PC's together," Mr. Leibovitch said. He said other data-transfer technologies like Bluetooth and infrared wireless systems "have never taken off."
Besides, diskette drives - which Apple computers have long abandoned - are being built into fewer computers and laptops. Meanwhile, at least one U.S.B. port (the initials stand for Universal Serial Bus) has become standard. And computers running Microsoft Windows ME or later or Apple's Mac OS 8.6 or later need no special drivers to recognize a U.S.B. flash drive.
Though the drives are small, Mr. Rogers said they are generally "pretty resistant to physical abuse" and, he noted, an improvement over optical storage media like DVD's and CD's, which are vulnerable to scratching. (SanDisk, a leading flash drive maker, has shown the sturdiness of its 512-megabyte Cruzer Titanium model by running over it with a taxicab in demonstrations.)
Not all computer users are eager to sling a flash drive around their necks and whistle while they work. Jose Velasco, a 30-year-old filmmaker in New York, said flash drive capacities are still inadequate for his digital video files, and too expensive. "If they start making a 20-gigabyte one for about $100, then I might be interested," he said as he sat behind his laptop at a Starbucks in Lower Manhattan. "The costs have to come down."
Some analysts and drive makers say that U.S.B. flash drive prices are falling as capacity grows. Already, lower-end 16- and 32-megabyte drives are disappearing, many point out.
Some flash drives are becoming so inexpensive that instead of printing elaborate folders stuffed with reports, for clients or the press, some companies are instead cramming the same information into low-cost drives and giving them away.
Guy Kawasaki, a venture capitalist, is including a 128-megabyte U.S.B. flash drive in his new book, "The Art of the Start" (Portfolio, 2004), for business-inclined readers who might want to use it to store digital presentations and business plans.
PNY Technologies, the manufacturer whose Executive Attache drive was used by DreamWorks Pictures and Paramount Pictures in "Collateral," said it is so confident in the continued growth of the drives that it now offers to place company logos and brand names on drives for presentations, trade shows and promotional events.
Mr. Helmly, the Adobe manager, said he realized that U.S.B. flash drives had crossed an important threshold when he recently shopped at an Office Depot store in Annapolis. He was astounded, he noted, to see a gaggle of teenagers gathered around a display case holding the drives. "They were required for school," he said.
Two of his three children also use them, Mr. Helmly said. "My youngest is 5 years old," he added. "But give him another year and he'll probably need one for the first grade."
Love mine.
