Chinavision is now offering a refillable Zippo style metal lighter that comes with a 4GB USB flash memory. It will allow you to both smoke things and store things like the 21st century Marlboro man.

Just like a real Zippo, it’s refillable. Looks like it only comes in cowboy cow skull flavor. It will cost you about $27. Just be careful you don’t fry your data. I’m surprised that zippo hasn’t started doing this. I bet they will pretty soon.

Check out this awesome USB drive. It’s from jasonscreations over at etsy. He makes all kinds of cool stuff, including USB drives from old toys. He’s got several different cars and trucks available, all very cool.

If you’re looking for an unusual USB drive, this is it. Or maybe you just love muscle cars. I don’t know about you, but this is the kind of drive I’ve been looking for. Everything is tested to ensure proper operation and it comes with a 6 foot usb extension cable. This one will cost you $25.

Target sure knows how to market themselves. Warner Brothers does too. The proof is in these awesome gift cards. Target’s Wii cards looked really cool, sure. But these Speed Racer themed cards feature a USB flash drive which makes them useful too. They include an integrated inch-long USB cable that’s flush in the card and is released via a mechanical switch on the bottom edge. The cards only hold about 62.8 MB, but the upside is that 51.6 MB of that is packed with awesome Speed Racer promotional materials. Stuff like a PDF coloring book featuring the Mach 5 and other vehicles, coupons for Speed Racer toys, wallpaper, videos and even a cheat code for the Wii Speed Racer game.

The cards are obviously a team-up between Target and Warner Brothers, to promote the new Speed Racer movie. It’s a pretty smart idea. I’m not sure if you are required to actually put any money on them or not.

There are tons of USB keys that have encryption software so you can keep your files safe from others, but if you’re paranoid enough, or if you are a super secret spy carrying around sensitive info, you might think that software encryption isn’t enough. So here’s the ultimate in USB key protection. The Flash Padlock, which has hardware encryption. In order to unlock it, you have to enter a pin number.

Perfect for that Top Secret “Eyes only” info that you carry from one spy gig to another. You can get it in 2GB and 4GB capacities, and it allows you to create 1 pin number or multiple pins and then register them on-line for easy retrieval in case your memory fails you. You can get the Flash Padlock for about $27.82.

The minute you see it, you just have to love the USBee concept flash drive. Traditional USB flash drives stick out from the back, and they’re easy to knock out accidentally. The USBee solves this, because just like a bee, it is capable of bending in any direction. This helps prevent your USB port from being permanently defunct should a standard USB flash drive be broken off at its connection point.

It’s not only ergonomic, it also has a vents for cooling and a detachable protective cap that sits on the back of the device when not in use. It’s the bee’s knees baby! All zing and no sting!

USB flash drives come in many shapes and sizes, but once in a while one comes along with a design that stands out from the crowd. The Wedisk flash drive is a little Wii remote look-a-like which isn’t touting incredible capacities or performance but it does allow its owner to further profess their love for Nintendo’s latest and greatest gaming console while at the office.

The Wedisk has a retractable USB connector that pops out with a push of one of the Wii-mote buttons but that’s the only gaming action you’ll get. It comes in capacities of 1GB, 2Gb, 4GB and 8GB and in colors of the familiar white and a black version. It also has a LED indicator for showing that is connected and utilizes USB 2.0 for PCs or Macs.

Larger capacity solid-state drives will be on their way soon from SanDisk. That’s because SanDisk and Toshiba are working together on a new 43-nanometer manufacturing process which will give us SSDs with the same capacity as those of today’s typical 2.5″ hard drives.

Flash memory is the natural replacement for hard drives in ultra-small notebooks like the MacBook Air and Asus Eee PC, because they use less power, generate less heat, and have faster access times than hard drives. The only downside is that as the Gbs go up the cost will get higher.

SanDisk upped their available SDHC card capacity today by putting 32GB of flash memory in the latest to the line of Ultra II SDHC cards. This new 32GB flash card reads and writes at 15MB/second, which is a nice increase from the 10MB/second found previously from the Ultra II’s.

This card to date is the largest flash memory card put out by SanDisk and brings them in line with the most capacity available in an SDHC card in the industry. This kind of storage can put as much as 4 hours of 1536 kbps MPEG-4 video or around 8,000 digital photos on a card not much larger than your thumbnail.

Corsair has released some new versions if its Flash Voyager and Flash Survivor USB drives, both featuring capacities that are pumped up to as much as 32GB each. The Voyager model has a rubberized covering and looks like it might be waterproof, but its not. It’s actually designed to take the occasional drop and keep on ticking, which is really nice if you’re holding 32GB of data or a whole bootable OS in your hand. The Survivor has an aluminum casing and it is actually water resistant, letting you tote your 20 hours of outdoor video through the rain forest without worrying about destroying the data, or something like that.

Compact flash cards are slowly becoming a thing of the past, being replaced by SD cards, but there are still alot of cameras that rely on the older format. So RIDATA is looking out for you. They just introduced what they call the SMART compact flash card.

They are SMART because the have a new internal data monitoring system that ensures you never experience any data loss. It’s nice to have alot of storage in your camera, but not a pleasant feeling when you lose an important file. The cards also have embedded error correction code (ECC) which I believe is a fancy way of saying that it has “back up power Captain”, should something truly go wrong.

Today SanDisk has launched its 8GB microSDHC and M2 flash memory cards and is kicking off the release of the new high capacity cards with a “Sunset Strip Block Party”. The event is called “Wake up Your Phone” and will be held at Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, California trying to raise the awareness to the many mobile phone owners do indeed have a slot in their mobile devices but may not be completely aware of it, or that SanDisk has something to fill it.

SanDisk is calling it a ’slot education’ program (wow) boasting that the new 8GB capacity cards can turn their boring old mobile phones into a fun-filled party gadget with the ability to store over 2,000 songs, 5,000 high-res pics or 5 hours of high quality MPEG-4 video that they can enjoy and share with others.

The concept of the RAM disk has been around for a while but due to expense and limitations are virtually unheard of in practical use. FusionIo, with its revolutionary ioMemory technology, intends to change all this and bridge the gap of limitations between current storage and memory technologies with the innovative new ioDrive.

The ioDrive, with a catch phrase “The power of a SAN in the palm of your hand”, operates on the PCI-Express x4 bus with access rates approaching DRAM with a sustained 600 and 800 MBytes/s write and read operations respectively. Aside from the high speed, small packet transfer feature of the drive, ioDrives require no RAID controller to provide redundancy between drives, there are no moving parts and they use industry standard form factor and interface.

Today Seagate took the wraps off of their first hybrid notebook hard drive featuring a combination of standard hard drive storage and Flash memory. The Momentus 5400 PSD features only a 5400 rpm spindle but promises faster system response times along with extended notebook battery life and better storage reliability. We’ve seen hybrid drives like these in the past with Samsung and Hitachi, and improved speed and efficiency through this type of storage combo is likely to be the standard in coming years.

The 2.5 inch drive utilizes 256MB of Flash-based memory for storing data that’s frequently accessed providing a quicker responses and through this also requires less drive disk access, cutting the power consumption of the drive more than in half. Having the additional quick-access memory also aids in faster OS boot times according to the company.

Got Halo? With yesterday’s release of “Halo 3″ it seems everyone is jumping on Bungie’s first-person shooter bandwagon. 7-11 has “Halo” Slurpee cups, Doritos have “Halo” branded chip bags and Mountain Dew is calling their pop “game fuel”. Although I do think those early pregnancy tests are taking things to far…

Mimoco is releasing their own “Halo” series of USB flash drives in three weeks. Compatible with USB 2.0 protocol the Halo Mimobot Series 1 line replicates the likeness of Master Chief, “Halo”’s hero. You can pick a drive in Spartan blue, red or Master Chief’s preference, forest green. They’re a little goofy looking but then again it’s supposed to be a tiny USB drive, right?

Zip Zip Memory Bricks are small USB 2.0 Flash memory drives encased inside a Lego-type toy building brick. When the cap is on they appear like a normal toy brick, but pulling one half of the brick apart exposes the USB 2.0 connector. They come in colors of green, yellow, blue, red, black or white, much like Lego bricks do, and have a capacity of 1GB.

The Memory Bricks also have a lanyard attached to make them harder to lose and easier to identify should you happen to drop it into a pile of regular toy bricks. The company says you can stack memory bricks just like you would with regular toy bricks, but what would be cooler is if the memory would stack up as well!