Forbes.com: Key Chain Drives Take Off

The Iomega 512-MB Mini Drive ($200) is about what you'd expect from a key chain drive. It's about the size of a man's thumb (they are sometimes called "thumb drives," after all) and uses a fast USB 2.0 connection. That makes it awfully handy for taking large files with you on short notice. We loaded a 27-megabyte videoclip, the trailer for The Return of the King, onto the drive in about five seconds.

We recently tried a 256-MB DiskOnKey Classic with a USB 2.0 connection. Installed onboard was a software package called HiPerExchange, which gives access to a Microsoft Outlook account from any computer it's plugged into. With less than a minute's work at configuration, the program on the drive gives access to the Outlook in-box, contacts and calendar. When new mail arrived, a little message announcing it appeared in the lower right-hand corner of the screen.

We used it to archive two years' worth of e-mail from Microsoft Outlook. It took a good half-hour or so, but that had more to do with the Outlook's archive function than the drive's performance. Once we got the drive home, we copied the archive directly to the hard drive on a home computer in about four minutes.