I have a gob of flash drives laying around my office, crammed in desk drawers, filling up my penholder and generally getting in my way. I don’t really use flash drives, it seems that companies issue members of the press these things as a sort of initiation. The main reason I don’t use them is that they are rather slow and don’t offer enough storage for a real backup.

OCZ introduced a new flash drive this month called the Throttle that does away with one of the common threads in the flash drive world — the USB connector. Rather than the comparatively pokey USB port, OCZ grafts a full-blown eSATA connector onto the Throttle.

While the computer industry is feeling the hurt from the slow economy Apple is quietly gobbling up market share in America and growing its user base. With the number of Mac users growing many manufacturers are starting to release more products that are compatible with the Mac OS.

SanDisk announced today that its Cruzer Enterprise secure USB flash drive is the first flash drive to fully support the Mac. The new support for Mac OS X allows IT pros to issue Mac users secure flash drives that function correctly in the Mac environment. The Enterprise drive uses hardware-based USB encryption to put mandatory access control on all files transferred to the flash drive to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive information.

Flash Drives are commodity items today that you can pick up everywhere from the junk isle at your local gas station, to the checkout lane at the grocery store. To try to set their products apart from the competition makers of flash drives are always trying to give their products a little something else to grab the eye and dollars of shoppers.

PNY offered a flash drive with a full digital version of the 80′s flick Ghostbusters not so long ago. Super Talent announced today that it would be offering flash drives that feature licensed material from The Godfather.

LaCie’s latest offering makes their flash drives more portable, though you’ll need to be careful that you don’t unwittingly spend it.

It’s thicker than a coin, but the metal exterior of the USB 2.0 drive provides the illusion, thereby making it easy to lose in a pocket full of change, or worse, in some stores register. It will cost you $20 for the 4GB version and $30 for the 8GB version. Not a bad price for the sizes, so you won’t mind too much when you accidentally pay for something with it and some dude at Walmart has some free pics of your wife…

We had heard talk about Samsung’s 256GB solid state drive back in May and it appears that today the talk has finally come true. Samsung has announced they are now officially manufacturing the large Flash-based drive, and we can tell you it’s fast. What we can’t tell you yet is how much it costs.

The speed of the 256GB drive is double that of Samsung’s 64GB and 128GB drives in what Samsung is calling “…disruptive performance”, with sequential read rates of 220MB/s and write rates of 200 MB/s. Applications can launch as much as 10 times faster than a 7200rpm notebook HDD with speeds that would be similar to a 15,000rpm drive.

Kingston’s DataTraveler DT150 USB flash drive has reached the 64GB storage mark, making it the top dog of DataTraveler USB drives. Chances are you won’t run out of space unless you really really love video. The size makes it a great portable backup drive. The Kingston DataTraveler 150 works with Windows Vista, XP, Windows 2000, Mac OS X 10.3 and Linux 2.6 and above. Your $177 purchase will get you a five-year warranty and 24/7 tech support too.

We got a chance to get our hands on Griffin’s new Simplifi desktop device recently and we feel they really got the name right on this one. The Simplifi is a small Swiss Army Knife of accessories packed into a smooth silver box that adds some convenience and maybe even a touch of sophistication to your desk.

For starters, the device is a dock and charger for your Apple iPhone and/or iPod. It has the docking port right on top and comes with little plastic adapters to custom …

Sensitive and confidential information printed from our computers and stored on out portable hard drives and flash drives gets lots of attention. We shred paper, and can encrypt electronic data on portable storage. What many overlook though is security for data stored on CDs.

When it comes time to toss that CD or DVD out that has your company’s financial info on it, you don’t want to simply throw it in the trash can where anyone who finds it can pop it into a computer can see the info. You need to destroy the CD and Aleratec has a new CD/DVD Shredder that will do just that.

SanDisk is having a rough year with some of the lowest stock prices in the company’s history. That hasn’t stopped the company from introducing new products and selling existing products like its Cruzer line of USB flash drives.

SanDisk and Veoh Networks announced today that the Veoh Web Player would initially only be available on SanDisk Cruzer flash drives. The player allows users to browse video, TV, and Web series on the go. Veoh says its web player puts the power of peer-to-peer in a user’s hand.

Super Talent is back with a new range of USB flash drives that feature 64GB of storage space, the highest capacity in the industry. So far. The Luxio USB flash drive will be available in black, silver or wood grain finish. The UV-coated plastic cases feature chrome-plated zinc trim. All Luxio USB flash drives feature dual-channel flash memory architecture, password protection, AES-256 hardware encryption, and maximum transfer speeds of approximately 30MB/s with an LED indicator. The 64GB Luxio will retail for about $150.

One of the biggest threats to data on an enterprise network comes from employees and flash drives. It’s easy for and employee to nefariously or accidentally introduce a virus or trojan into the network that could destroy or steal important data.

SanDisk is offering a flash drive called the Cruzer Enterprise that includes integrates anti-malware protection form McAfee. The software protects USB drive users from data leaks and features McAfee’s Scan engine offering heuristic analysis for detection of known and unknown threats.

Joining such USB drives as the Aigo and the bottle opener USB drive, here’s another that’s actually useful for more then just holding data. The eraser flash drive. Because sometimes you gotta, you know, erase stuff.

Instructables will show you how to make one, if the one you have now is just too ugly or with a broken case. Then you’ll know the joy of being able to erase whenever your USB drive is near. Assuming you still use a pencil, that is.

Looking at family photos has come a long way since I was a kid. My mom had volumes of photo albums with pictures crammed in slots. Inevitably, over time they would stick to the pages and ruin the pictures. Today for family photos, we store thousands of them on one tiny memory card or our computers and view them on a digital photo frame. The next evolution of viewing family photos will be looking at them on the big screen TV in the living room.

You can do something similar on an Apple TV, but you have to send the photos over a network to the device. PIE Unites has a new digital photo viewer called the HD-0310 that connects to your HDTV via HDMI and can display images at full 1080p resolution.

This is one sweet looking single seat vehicle designed by Carlos Arturo Torres Tovar, who obviously channels the future like some crazy modern techno-shaman. I don’t know whether to drive it or just drool over it for an hour.

The idea is that the car works mainly through articulation meaning that this vehicle remains low at high speeds and it will also display helpful information during long trips through voice command by the driver. RD is convenient on busy roads as well as on long distance drives. Looks comfy too. It’s definitely a cool one to drive, but one problem. No room for a girl beside you. Check out a video below.

So you’ve got about a hundred lighters laying around, just like you have a huge pile of flash drives, because all you do is smoke like a fiend and save data all day for some reason. I feel your pain. Why not combine the lighter with the flash drive and have both in one convenient device. It’s made to look like a Zippo. A refillable Zippo with an 8GB flash drive and retractable USB connection that slides out of the bottom. The flame is adjustable, but the price is not at $59.99. If the Doors were around today they might sing Come On Baby Light My File.