If a finger print scanner isn’t quite enough for you to feel comfortable with keeping your data on a portable USB flash drive you will want to take a look at the Irikon Flash memory device from Rehoboth Technology.

This thumb drive has biometric security similar to many flash drives that use finger print scanners except that this one requires a scan of your eye, or your iris to be exact, to authenticate your access of the drive. It can remember up to 20 different irises and is USB 1.1 and 2.0 compatible. Not a whole lot of detail is given about how the iris scanning part works other than you need to look into the iris camera from no further away than 6 cm.

The Irikon has an on-board rechargeable battery that charges up when it’s connected. …

Kingston has a USB memory card reader that’s able to handle a lot of the many types of memory formats out there, bundled into one small thumb drive-sized device.

The MobileLite 9-in-1 card reader connects via USB 1.1 or 2.0 direct to your computer with no additional cords, and has three slots that support 9 different types of memory cards. On one side of the reader there’s one slot that supports SD/SDHC, MMC, MMCmobile, RS MMC and MMCplus card formats. The other side has two slots that both support microSD, MMCmicro and miniSD card formats. When the MobileLite reader is connected to your computer, all three of the slots show up as separate drives to drag and drop files between your computer and the memory, or between each other.

Although 9 different formats in such as small device is certainly not …

SanDisk has launched a new USB Flash memory drive touting it as a combination of improved performance and style, which I have to say is a nice change. There’s nothing like going into a meeting full of suits to do a presentation and have to pull out your holiday cheer Flash drive your sister got you for Christmas to load up your slides.

The SanDisk Cruzer Contour has a nice, sleek, glossy black finish with no cap to lose. The USB connector hides itself underneath the frame and slides out when needed, similar to a retractable click-pen. When plugged in the word “Cruzer” lights up with a blue LED light, which basically translates to: “I’m still a geek, but I’m cooler than you”.

SanDisk also doubled the write speed and made the read speed about 2/3 times faster than their previous fastest …

We’ve seen some solid state drives announced but today Samsung is the company that was able to bring a 1.8″ 64GB solid state drive into mass production. The SSD is intended for use in UMPC’s, notebooks and other portable devices as a smaller, faster, lightweight replacement to traditional hard drives.

Drives using Flash-based memory promises to provide faster boot times to be quicker at pulling up applications since it can access the data faster. It also boasts a lower battery consumption compared to devices with spinning hard drives.

Samsung didn’t provide any pricing in their press release today, but did predict a 270% increase in SSD use over the next three years. For now though the 64GB flash based drive will likely be an upgrade option on portable devices, and not sold directly to consumers.

One of the latest creations from Art Lebedev, the maker of the Optimus Maximus keyboard, really needs no explanation. Adding a little nostalgia to a Flash memory USB drive this one is shaped like a classic manila folder, and also not unlike the folder icons you would find on a Windows OS. With this file folder shaped flash drive you can make it clear from looking at it that this thumb drive is all business, but getting a tiny little label on the folder tab to identify which business might be a little tougher.

Product Page via Engadget

This JetFlash V85 is one of the more flashier Flash drives we’ve seen with a zinc alloy body and gold band signifying it’s the 8GB version (compared to the silver-banded 4GB and blue-banded 2GB models). An included chain helps you keep it on a short leash.

The JetFlash V85 is USB 2.0 compatible and works like most any other USB drive, but this one comes with a lifetime warranty and a small package of eight software add-ons (Windows only) to help manage your data on the drive which include:

PC-Lock Function: Makes the JetFlash V85 a key to lock your computer
Secret-Zip Function: Compresses and/or password protects saved files using
AES encryption
E-Mail Function: Use your JetFlash V85 to securely send, receive, and save
e-mails
Auto Login Function: Automatically login to websites where you have a
password
Favorites Function: Store all your favorite website addresses on the …

USB flash drives, being a dime a dozen, can look pretty utilitarian at times. If a unique look is what you see you may find happiness in these 1GB Porcelain Memory Drives.

That’s right – porcelain. The European design firm Mokkatanten has designed a USB flash drive with a porcelain shell. It is handcrafted and glazed in a non-tech body design to give it that extra something special. It even sports an operating LED which makes the drive glow through the china when in use. You also get USB 2.0 support and a hand knit little pouch to carry your $125 drive around in.

While this porcelain drive idea is pretty cool, us dudes will stick with our USB SurfDrives instead, thank you very much.

Porcelain Memory, via Uber-Review

It was just last week when the Multimedia Card Association introduced the miCARD format to the world. Designed to work with both USB and MMC slots the miCARD can hold up to 2 GB of info presently and the designers speculate the the technology’s upper-limit will be 2 terabytes. The idea is to cram more memory onto the same size of a unit and make it more functional for dual entry ports. Not too shabby for something so small, right?

Pretec is the first company out of the gate to announce its first miCARD series dubbed the S-Diamond. The models will range in storage capacity between 128 MB to 8 GB. No word on availability or prices as of yet.

Source: EverythingUSB

The USB SurfDrive sounds like it might be some cool storage gadget that automatically saves information or settings while surfing the internet, but the cool part of this USB thumb drive lies in its surfboard shape more than its functionality.

There are USB flash drives available for the geek in just about everyone, and now even for the surfers, or at least the hodad’s. So, if you’re like me and wish you could be standing on the beach next to your cool car and a surf board stuck in the sand, maybe propping this little SurfDrive up against your desktop speakers will be almost as good? Maybe not…

The USB SurfDrive works on Windows and Mac’s and comes in capacities ranging from 256MB up to 2GB.

GetUSB via CoolestGadgets

SanDisk today is offering business computer users some serious new security USB flash drives for protecting valuable data. These drives are the Cruzer Professional ($55 to $145) and the Cruzer Enterprise ($75 to $185).

The SanDisk Cruzer Professional, available in storage sizes up to 4GB, offers hardware-based 256-bit AES encryption. This is on top of letting you create a password protected private area on the drive for your eyes only. The Cruzer Professional gets a maximum read speed of 24MB per second.

The Cruzer Enterprise, meanwhile, has the same hardware protection while also taking the password option one step further. It requires that all of the drive’s contents be complex password protected. While we aren’t exactly sure what complex means we assume the four letter password of your dog’s name won’t work with this drive.

USB flash drives come in all shapes and sized these days, and not even a lego brick can escape it.

A Australian company called Zip Zip has created a 1GB USB flash memory thumb drive out of small Lego bricks just to add a little fun to you data storage needs.

This design makes me wonder if you could stack these bricks together, and something that would be really cool is if by stacking them you could expand the memory. But for now I think they are just regular Lego bricks with a flash drive built in.

The Lego USB flash drive comes in six colors of yellow, blue, red, white, black and green and retails for just under $49 ($59 AUD).

ZipZip via Giz

Today Samsung has announced a chipset for mobile phones targeting those ever-growing multimedia files of music and movies that everyone likes to take with them. The MoviMCP (Muti-Chip Package) is a set of Flash memory for operating the phone as well as storing files.

The moviMCP has a capacity of 4GB to store data to be exact, which almost eliminates the need for purchasing an expensive external SD card. The package also allocates 128MB of RAM and 256MB of flash memory for running the core operations of the phone.

Denser memory such as this allows phone designers, including Apple with the iPhone, to be able to make their designs even slimmer without compromising storage capacity. No exact date on when we’ll see devices using this chipset quite yet or what kind of cost implications it will have but Samsung …

Samsung has unleashed the latest in tiny Flash memory device technology with an 8GB MicroSD card, doubling the previously largest 4GB card by SanDisk.

The significance of this, other than the obviously larger storage capacity, is how this will help bring just about any media phone that uses MicroSD in closer competition with Apple’s new iPhone touting it’s 8GB flash storage capacity. With this release an 8GB media phone won’t be that hard to come buy and most likely will not require a $600 price tag.

To avoid you having to do some quick math, this card could potentially hold 2,000 MP3 files, 4,000 digital images, or about five full-length movies. Unfortunately we don’t expect to see this new card from Samsung until mid-2008 and there is no word on price, yet.

Similar to peanut butter and chocolate a money clip and a USB Flash drive each on their own are not too bad, but combine the two and now you’ve really got something.

One of the better Father’s Day gadget gift contenders I’ve seen this year, the Memorex Money Clip Flash Drive connects to both a Mac and PC via USB 2.0, has a 1GB capacity and is getting $34.99 at Target stores. It’s a little on the thick side as far as money clips go, but convenience should more the inconvenience of size.

You can see it listed at Target.com but you’ll have to find a brick and mortar to actually buy one.

There have been a number of innovations with portable storage over the past couple of years with everything from vastly increasing capacities to more informative drives, and Lexar is continuing with the Lexar Jumpdrive Secure II Plus. The “Plus” is an additional capacity meter that lets your know how full your thumb drive is without having to connect it to a computer to check.

This flash drive comes in a number of capacities from 512MB up to 4GB, with and 8GB model coming soon. It works pretty much like any other USB flash media by connecting it to your PC via the USB port and transferring whatever data you would like onto it. The big difference being that on the Secure II Plus, you can see when you drive is getting full by …