New-age storage chips make a fashion statement

Towards the end of the latest Tom Cruise thriller, Collateral, the story’s action turns on the performance of a player new to most movi...

Towards the end of the latest Tom Cruise thriller, Collateral, the story’s action turns on the performance of a player new to most movie audiences. For a suspense-charged moment Cruise and his co-star, Jamie Foxx, are upstaged by a silvery finger of portable storage technology. In recent months, these slender solid-state memory chips — known by many names, but officially USB flash drives — have increasingly been seen blinking from the ports of computers in classrooms and libraries, conference rooms and offices, coffee shops and airport lounges.

And when the devices, which can cost less than a music CD, are not being used to store or retrieve data, they often dangle from key chains and backpacks — or even from the necks of users — as if pendants signifying a cult of convenient computing. Some are built discreetly into pens or wristwatches; a maker in Japan is now marketing them in the form of lipstick tubes. ‘‘It’s such an easy technology,’’ said David K. Helmly, senior business development manager for digital video and video imaging of Adobe Systems, who keeps one in his pocket, another inside a pen and sometimes another on a lanyard around his neck.

Portable hard drives and high-capacity storage devices like Jaz and Zip drives came before it, but the flash drive has changed the equation.

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Helmly, for example, has largely stopped lugging a laptop from office to office, or to his home in Annapolis, because he can tuck away what he needs on a flash drive that is extremely lightweight.

In some cases, flash drives have suddenly become so commonplace that, as with cellphones, their owners are adding fashion touches to lend them a personal identity. Many are being made in iPod-ish ivory and a range of candy colours; lots are as shiny as new spoons. ‘‘Anything you wear around your neck becomes jewellery,’’ said Ellen Lupton, director of the master of fine arts programme in graphic design at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and the curator of contemporary design at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York.

And wear it around her neck is what she does. ‘‘A lanyard comes with them,’’ Lupton said. ‘‘You’re going to wear it, and if you’re going to wear it you want it to be cool. Why hide it?’’ To hers, she has added a wrap of decorative tape.

Sales of USB flash drives have tripled over the last year, and the USB Flash Drive Alliance, a trade group created last year to promote their use, has projected that they will be the leading removable solid-state storage format by next year, surpassing Secure Digital cards and memory sticks. Some 67 million to 120 million of the drives are expected to be shipped worldwide in 2005, said Steffen Hellmold, president of the alliance. Web-Feet, a research firm, forecasts that the worldwide market for USB flash drives will reach $4.5 billion in 2006 and $5.5 billion in 2007.

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Other makers are also, not surprisingly, bullish on their products. Mike Wong, a spokesman for SanDisk, said USB flash drives are ‘‘the floppy disks of the 21st century — they are an extension of our handbags, our pockets’’.

But flash drives are much more capable than the old plastic disks, said Allen Leibovitch, programme manager for semiconductor research at IDC.

And while makers concede that speeds can vary, some of the drives can write and retrieve data as quickly as the speediest mechanical hard drives in computers. But mostly, the allure is in the size. — NYT

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