One spring day in 1993, I found myself coasting through the crowded aisles at COMDEX Atlanta, marveling at all the new devices and contraptions – full-color dot matrix printers, Intel DX2 processors, and the like – when I stumbled onto the Commodore booth in which a guy was demoing a 3.5-inch floppy disk. No big story there. By 1993, the 3.5 disks had been around for years, having replaced the larger and flimsier 5.25-inchers, which you may have seen on display in your local museum near the Cabbage Patch Dolls. What made the Commodore disk special was that it held a whopping 25 MB of data. Now that was unheard of. I immediately assumed that this was the wave of the future, and promptly informed everyone at my company to prepare for high-volume, high-density 3.5 floppies. “They’re at 25 megs now, and they’ll probably be up to 100 by the end of the year. Get ready for the wave.”

For whatever reason, the wave never came. Sure, Iomega turned the idea into an industry all its own, but the disk I saw at COMDEX didn’t need a special hardware reader like a ZIP drive or JAZ drive – it worked in a regular 3.5 floppy drive on an IDE bus.

For a good ten years following my COMDEX experience, we continued to rely on the tried-and-true 3.5 floppy to transfer small files between computers. Then, about a year ago, the evolution of technology took its due course and we started hearing about something called a flash pen, which is a storage device cleverly disguised as a key chain. When I bought my wife a laptop a few weeks ago (see “Taking the Laptop Plunge“), I picked up a flash pen the same day.

Flash pens (aka memory keys) are so called because they use flash memory and come in all shapes, colors, and capacities. I suppose the manufacturer expects us to carry them around on our key rings or in our vest pockets, but when you’re talking about a large volume of data – possibly critical data – you probably want to guard it a little closer than that. The flash pen I bought holds 256 MB and cost me $60. I’d never used one before, but when I got the flash pen home, I expected it to plug and play in any USB port and act like a floppy disk that holds as much data as 150 floppies. Expectations being what they are, I’m glad to report that the flash pen did exactly that and I couldn’t be more pleased. In fact, the flash pen is so great, I’m surprised people aren’t making a bigger deal out of it. This thing is going to put the final nail in the archaic 3.5-inch, 1.44 MB floppy coffin, not that anyone’s going to bother sending flowers to the funeral.

My flash pen is marketed as a Lexar JumpDrive 2.0 Pro. I didn’t know what the 2.0 meant until I got it home and tried it out. When I copied some files from the laptop’s hard drive to the flash pen, it was practically instantaneous. But when I copied those files from the pen to my desktop PC, it took a bit longer. I found out why when I got an event message that said “This storage device uses USB 2.0, but your lame system only has USB 1.1″ or something to that effect. No problem, really. It just runs slower on my desktop (yes, the one I just built in April) than on the laptop.

A little research revealed that USB 1.1 allows a max transfer rate of 12 Mbits per second, where USB 2.0 (aka Hi-Speed USB) can go up to 480 Mbits/sec. Slight difference there.

You can find out if your system supports Hi-Speed USB by going into Device Manager (in WinXP, Control Panel > System > Hardware > Device Manager) and looking under USB controllers. If you’ve got an Enhanced USB host controller, you’ve got Hi-Speed USB. If not, you’re out of luck. Can you upgrade from 1.1 to 2.0 through Windows drivers or some other way? I’m still working on that one.

But as you’ve probably detected, the speed issue hasn’t dampened my enthusiasm for my new flash pen. I honestly can’t think of a good reason to have a 3.5 floppy drive in a computer anymore, unless the PC is so old that it doesn’t have a single USB port, in which case you’ll want to build a new computer anyway. And when you do, figure in an extra $60 for a flash pen, and feel free to thank me in advance.