Memory takes walk down another lane

Throw away your knackered 3sup1/2-inch floppy discs, USB (universal serial bus) storage devices are all the rage these days.

The devices, such as IBM's Memory Key, plug in to the USB ports normally used to connect printers, digital cameras or keyboards to your PC.

With a capacity of eight megabytes, the Memory Key holds about five times as much data as your regular floppy disc and talks to your machine about five times as fast.

The key has inbuilt support for Windows Millennium and 2000.

But for some programs a driver device is needed. Once the drivers are loaded you can access the device as you would any other floppy or hard drive with a program such as Windows file explorer.

The Memory Key is displayed on the Windows desktop as a drive like any other.

IBM's offering comes at the bottom end of the market, with models now available from a range of manufacturers offering 128 megabytes of storage and above. And with USB 2.0 devices coming to market towards the end of the year, extending performance by up to 40 times the existing capability, compact, modular storage devices are likely to kiss goodbye to fiddly Zip disk drives and "floppies" for good.

A word of warning for Apple Mac users, however. The Memory Key is strictly a PC-based device.

It costs about $NZ115.