USB Flash Drives

All flash drives are not created equal, especially as far as the Air is concerned. In addition to memory sizes, speeds and pricetags, you also have to deal with the physical size of the drive. And bigger is not better for the Air. Since the Air's USB port hangs very low to the desk and has a tight upper clearance as well, fat drives won't work. They can raise the right side of the Air off the desk. I can't imagine that flexing the bottom of your Air every time you press a key could be good for it. They also put unnatural pressure on the port. Then there's the problem of not clearing the top of the port which can lead to cosmetic scratching and a drive that doesn't connect properly.

Personally I like retractable drives with a one piece construction. There's no cap to loose, but the plug is somewhat protected from lint and from getting banged and bent. So I'm limiting my options even more.

The Sandisk Contour is out right away. Shame. This an excellent drive with superfast writes speeds, all metal construction, a unique retraction system that completely seals the plug. It's so fat that two feet of the Air don't touch the desk.

The Sandisk Cruzer Micro is readily available, but it still puts a tiny bit of unnatural pressure on the port door and presses against the upper surface of the port. It's very usable but longterm may loosen the port.

While physical size is important for the Air, speed can't be overlooked. Burn speeds vary greatly. I ran the three drives I tested through the Jodi Test. (I have a 65 meg video of my friend Jodi at the Yellow Springs Street Fair playing ukulele and singing for a buck to some guy from New Orleans.) On a 16 gig Sandisk Contour this file burned in 4 seconds. On a 1 gig Sandisk Micro the file burned in 13 seconds, more than three times slower. Reports on the net are that the 16 gig Micro burns even slower.

What I settled on was a 4 gig Sony Click. I would rather have had the 16, but Circuit City was having a sale. This drive retracts like a pen and is very thin. It seats in the Air nicely, putting no pressure on the port door nor touching the top of the port. The Click is not super fast, but faster than the Micro. The Jodi Test took 10 seconds. The Click also dismounted faster than both of the Sandisks. If you were to pick a lesser known brand, write times may be substantially slower. As a rule of thumb, if write speed is not noted on the packaging, expect the drive to be slow. The Clik's retracting system feels a little flimsy, but mine is showing no real signs of wear. It has an LED indicator and comes up to 16 gigs.

No matter what drive you select, it's a good idea to reformat it. Open the Utilities folder inside your Apps folder and launch the Disk Utility. Choose the Erase option and format the disk as FAT32 if you intend to use it on a PC as well. And face it, most of us do occasionally need to transfer files to a PC. FAT32 is a Microsoft format that can be read by anything. The journalled Mac drive format is faster, but this can't be read by a PC.

A good reason for formatting is all of the auxiliary file system software added to flash drives. Sony's are easily zapped during an erase with Disk Utility. Unfortunately Sandisk's U3 disk operating system is not. You'll have to dismount both the disk and the U3 Drive on Mac's running OS 10.4 or older and on PCs. This is a pain. And the U3 removal software only works on PC. There were apparently enough complaints about U3 that Apple gave Leopard the ability to ignore it and not automatically mount it on your desktop.

A recent article in 2600 The Hacker Quarterly noted the vulnerability of U3. Auto-booting viral scripts could theoretically be installed to work with U3 when the drive is plugged into a host computer. These could do more devious things than infect a system. They could install software, read files off the host computer and communicate sensitive data over the net. And the host computer is not just yours but any you plug the drive into. This has never been reported as having actually been done, but U3 seems like just one more OS you'd need to worry about security for. Potential U3 transmitted viruses can't work on the Mac OS, but could with a PC or when Windows is installed and booted on your Air. Like I said, this is a theoretical issue, but not one we should have to deal with.