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

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

For all of you heavy duty survivor types out there that need dependable technology for your spelunking, deep-sea diving or any other fun pastimes, Corsair claims to have created the world’s toughest flash drive.

The Flash Survivor sounds like it could survive a boat sinking or building detonation: it’s water resistant to a depth of 200 meters (or 20 atmospheres), encased in durable industrial grade aluminum, protected by a ring of rubber molding and surrounded by a metal tube with two end caps. In short, if you’re taking this USB drive anywhere where you really start to question whether it will come back in working condition you’ve probably got a death wish.

The Flash Survivor comes in 4 GB ($59.99) and 8 GB ($129.99) models, has a 10 year warranty and also has a 256 bit AES security encryption application pre-loaded to further protect …

The digital photography age hasn’t been kind to old school titans like Polaroid. The creators of the instant photo have taken a beating as digital cameras and photo quality printers hit the market and eliminated the need for dropping off your canister of film at the local photo department. However, this latest announcement from the company shows that there’s still innovation happening in their R&D department.

The Polaroid Media Backup CGA-02540 is perfect for anyone you know that is technophobic when it comes to downloading or transferring photos from one computer to another. When you plug this unit into your system’s USB it automatically searches for any digital photos, copies them to its 40 GB of storage and voila, instant backup. That’s it. No software to learn, no extra cables to clutter up your drawers, it all comes down to Polaroid’s ClickFree software.

It comes …

SavitMicro has a new secure hard drive called the DataMore V2 available for consumers in Korea, although according to Akihabara News you can special order it in the US at GeekStuff4U.com.

The drive is intended to allow you to store your own data securely in a portable, external hard drive. When you first get the drive you can format it and define how much of the drive is “public” and how much of it is “secure”. When connectto a PC via USB, it will show the public portion of the drive that is unsecured at make that available. The secure portion will not be available until you scan your fingerprint on the outside of the drive case, then the secure partition will be available.

When setting up the drive, you can give on or all of your fingerprints to be set …

Today scientists from IBM, Macronix and Qimonda unveiled a new type of memory with the intention of possibly being a replacement for flash memory which is used in many electronic gadgets today.

The new memory announced today is called “phase-change” memory. The memory would have the same applications as flash memory, but with a a couple key advantages. First of all, the phase-change memory has shown to be faster than flash memory; up to 500 times faster. It would also only consume about half the power that flash memory does, even with the greater speed. Secondly, the phase-change memory is smaller. A cross section of the new memory prototype measures only 3 x 20 nanometers.

“These results dramatically demonstrate that phase-change memory has a very bright future,” said Dr. T. C. Chen, Vice President, Science & Technology, IBM Research. …

bioMETRX has a few products that are secured through a finger activated technology that only allows the owner to access the data it contains. The smartSTICK is one of these devices which happens to be portable USB drive.

It holds data and works like any other thumb drive, but in this case your thumb can actually be used to give you access to the drive. By simply sliding your finger over the sensor you can set and gain access to the drive contents.

The drive can save up to 10 users and comes in storage capacities as much as 1GB. It also comes with a number of software applications to aid in storage, including storing medical records, school work, personal PC settings, email addresses, IM buddy lists and other productivity applications.

Product Page [bioMETRX]