What type of person are you? Do you carry a USB thumbdrive with you, or flash cards with a card reader?
I carry both, but that’s because I’m The Gadgeteer and am always prepared for a geek emergency. That said, I’ve always liked thumbdrives better. Flash cards and readers are more tedious to use because you have to put the card in the reader and then attach a cable to the reader and then to the computer. Thumbdrives are easier and faster to use because you can just pull off the cap, insert it into a free USB port and you’re ready to copy files.
Another reason why I like thumbdrives is because they come in all kinds of shapes and sizes.
Here’s my collection of drives. My fave is the 256mb Cat drive. Yeah, I know that it doesn’t have a lot of storage capability, but it’s so cute! :o) My next favorite drive is the Buffalo 4gb drive (2nd from the Right) from Brando USB because it has great storage capability. The big shiny USModular drive in the middle is also a 4gb drive, but it has an actual tiny mechanical hard drive inside it. That wouldn’t normally matter all that much me, but it makes clicking noises when it is accessing files. Bleh… So, what do you use?
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I kill two birds with one stone: a Lexar portable card reader and USB flash drive. It accepts most flash memories and can plug into a USB slot.
http://www.lexar.com/readers/trio.html
Bill
I usually carry both. However, now that I’m using my Lifedrive and NEX 3+ to listen to music less and less, I’ll probably stop carrying the card reader unless I have my camera.
I prefer the thumb drive (AKA UBS key) because of its compactness. I think the card reader, however small, is fat enough to block access to adjacent ports. Likewise, if you are in market for a new USB key, don’t forget to inspect the width of the drive: is it too fat that it forces you to unplug other neighboring devices?
I prefer the USB key. It is more handy to carry around and i don’t have to bring both the card and the reader.
On the odd occasion, i do use my old 1gig ipod shuffle as a thumbdrive…
BUT for everyday use, my main portable carry-around unit is a old 5400rpm 80gig laptop disk-drive i removed and installed into a mini firewire/usb case.
Well, I don’t really carry either at the moment…but a USB thumbdrive is currently on my Amazon.com wishlist. (2GB Swiss Memory). The USB thumbdrive I did original get, has become permanently docked in my home computer (though that’s largely because I use my Windows laptop almost never now). And, I think I want to keep personal data and work data on seperate thumb drives.
OTOH, I do have a card reader ‘permanently’ installed in my work laptop’s ExpressCard slot. I used to have something similar in my windows laptop’s PC Card slot (though that computer had a built-in SD card reader).