Buy Now...

Not that long ago a floppy disc (remember them?) carried all your files, then almost overnight they were not enough and other methods of transportation developed. One that has gained great adoption in recent times has been the USB stick drive, I still have one from only a matter of months ago it was 8MB. They were all much of the same physical size but had different memory sizes. 512MB now seems popular and the price is not a lot. 64MB seems to be an entry level and looking at the blurb there is a 64MB version of the Iomega Micro Mini for less than £20.

Here I am looking at the 128MB version that strangely costs somewhat more than double the 64MB offering. It is as the name suggests small the total dimensions are 3.5x2x1cm. That is around the length of an average paper clip and if you stored all your documents on paper that the Micro Mini could contain you would need an awful lot of paper clips. Putting it another way if the files were all small enough to fit on a floppy disc then you could fill around 85 floppies with the same contents as one Iomega Micro Mini.

Popular articles

more

Yes you do pay a premium for the small size and I have no doubt that over the coming months other manufacturers will produce their own clones so then the price of ‘Micro Mini’ type drives will fall.

So what do you get, the drive and three covers, yes the Micro Mini can be a fashion accessory. It comes with Metallic Black, Dark Blue and Copper covers. Also supplied is a neck chain (only in chrome) as well as an A-B extension lead for those USB ports that are either round the back or where manufacturers place them so close together that to occupy two adjacent ports requires Vaseline or a crow bar.  

In use the unit is just like any other stick drive, files can be dragged and dropped to and from it as it becomes just another drive letter in My Computer. I suspect that 64MB or 128MB could hold so many documents that you are likely to be driven mad by the size of the folders. The likely use would be for digital photos and music files be they Wav or more like MP3 or WMA. There is no reason why short videos could not be carried.

The ordinary stick drive is still to my mind a gadget so the Iomega Micro Mini must certainly be one. Most people seem to drop stick drives into a pocket or purse, wearing it round your neck alongside the security pass seems to be a logical next step. In fact one security method I have heard of is that data on the PC can only be unencrypted with a stick drive so surely something like the Micro Mini seems the logical next step.

The stated price on the Iomega site for the 128MB version is £47.91 against £19.97 for the 64MB version. I can find few references to this new products on UK sites although Amazon.Com has the 64MB for $48 and the 128MB for $80 so on that basis it makes the 64MB even better value over here. The 64MB would certainly rate 4 rather than the 3 given for the 128MB version.

http://www.iomega-europe.com/eu/shop.aspx?category_name=MicroMiniDriveType