As a hospitalist at St. Francis, Dr. Kimberly Moore cares for patients that she's never met before. She must assimilate information about the patient's history, medication and allergies quickly.

Moore is responsible for caring for other doctors' patients.

"I haven't developed that relationship," she said. "So, I'm a newcomer to them."

Medical data could become life-saving information.

Moore recommends filling out a St. Francis medical data card that includes medication, including dosages, diagnosis and names and numbers of your doctors. That's the simplist form to keep records.

A popular storage device called a USB drive also proves to be handy in emergency situations.

"You can put [medical data] on a disk or a flash drive and put it on your keychain," she said. "This would certainly expedite care and help me deliver proper care."

St. Francis also sees out-of-town patients, especially during the holidays - another reason Moore says carrying your medical information is important.

TEAC has introduced a new multifunction portable hard drive, although if by "multifunction" you're expecting TEAC to provide many functions, you may be somewhat disappointed. The primary function here is, of course, storage, with 40GB, 80GB, and 120GB options available to suit daily data diet. The multitude of other functions begins and ends with how you get all that data onto the drive, with not only a regular USB 2.0 interface at your disposal, but a built-in memory card reader to accommodate all your standard memory card formats as well. The idea being to reduce the number of memory cards you need to carry around with you to one, which you can offload directly onto the TEAC drive whenever it gets stuffed. What it won't let you do is view the photos or listen to the music you've got stored on it directly from the drive, a la other multi multifunction devices, but you can view the drive's status on its "large" LCD screen. It's not clear how much it'll cost yet, but TEAC says the the 40GB model will be available December 1st, with the 80GB and 120GB drives to follow at a later, unspecified date

Moser Baer expands its commitment to data storage with the introduction of the ‘Moser Baer’ range of USB Flash drives in the Indian market. According to industry estimates, along with optical media, the USB flash drives are the fastest growing segment in the portable storage market.

According to Bhaskar Sharma, Executive Vice President, “The launch complements our existing optical media business and we will leverage our strong branding and marketing network to emerge as the top player with a significant market share in this segment also.”

According to the Dataquest Top20 survey, the Indian market for flash drives has seen stupendous growth and has grown from 100,000 units in 2004-05 to over 900,000 units in 2005-06. The shift from FDD to pen drives, which started in the last 1-2 years, gained considerable momentum in the year 2005-06 riding on the demand generated by the working professionals in corporate and SOHO segments. The youth market, which had started picking up in 2004-05, further strengthened, contributing to this growth. Corporate and SOHO will continue to be the biggest market for Flash drives for a couple of years more.

With capacities ranging from 512 MB to 4 GB, the Moser Baer range will have one million rewritable cycles and its advanced technology circuitry has data retention feature of upto 10 years. The high end range with a capacity of 4 GB is capable of holding over 1,000* MP3 songs or high definition images and over hours of MPEG4 video footage.

Someday goldfish will desire 12GB of disk. Until then, I-O Data's HDMC-U series of waterproof disks are all yours. These 1-inch drives feature a waterproofiness in waters as deep as 1-meter and can withstand the shock of being dropped from as high as 122-centimeters. Something you'll be thankful for when the robofish rise from the waters like our carbon based ancestors. The perimeter of the shell is surrounded by a rubberized USB cable which offers both bounce and a jack at-the-ready for your computer. On sale in Japan starting mid-December in either 8GB / 12GB capacities for ¥16,485 / ¥22,050 which translates to about $142 / $190.

Prestigio is at it again, this time bringing a somewhat prestigious portable hard drive wrapped in supple, sure-to-be-costly leather. This tidbit of luxury sports a 0.69- x 3.20- x 5.16-inch enclosure, which is covered in a "stylish classic black or brown leather coating," and houses your choice of 40, 60, 80, 100 or 120GB 2.5-inch hard drive. Additionally, it boasts a "one touch" backup system, allowing you to clone your data onto the portable drive with just the press of a button, and while it supports a software-based password system, the lack of a biometric scanner keeps it from true greatness. The classy Data Safe II comes packaged in a "fashionable box," derives all the power it needs from just a USB 2.0 port, and should be available real soon. Although there's no price set just yet, you can sign up for the "pre-sale" on the company's website should you so desire.

ST. GEORGE, UT -- (MARKET WIRE) -- November 28, 2006 -- CyberKey Solutions, Inc. (PINKSHEETS: CKYS) today announced that it is donating thousands of CyberKey Devices USB drives and numerous KeepSafe storage units to U.S. troops and Key Command Posts both in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In keeping with the interest of CyberKey products generated at the Asia Pacific Homeland Defense Summit, the CyberKey Board of Directors has further honored its commitment to supporting the men and women of our armed forces -- by providing them with the most secure and innovated solutions on the market.

"Throughout the last several years, major media outlets have reported on the issue of unsecured data on U.S. military USB flash drives that have turned up for sale outside a large military installation. It is our intent to offer key leaders an innovative solution to prevent the occurrence of these types of scenarios," stated Jim Plant, CEO of CyberKey Solutions.

Both the CyberKey Stealth and KeepSafe biometric devices will be introduced to the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan in early 2007. They are designed to provide the men and women in uniform another layer of personal and physical security for the storing and transporting of sensitive, material and information -- whether it's government documents or letters and pictures from loved ones.

Mobile storage devices such as the humble USB stick or iPod might not seem much of a security risk.

But as the amount of data they are able to absorb has increased, they have become a very effective tool for covertly making off with files from the corporate network.

The problem here is the combination of growing storage capacity with the fact that devices such as USB (universal serial bus) memory sticks, cameras and Apple Computer iPods look pretty inconspicuous in the hands of an employee. Ninety-nine times out of a 100 there may be nothing to worry about, but if an employee does "go rogue," those devices may be the most effective tool at their disposal.

Similarly, inbound data could also be a problem. Employees transferring files from home on a mobile device may not be aware there is also malicious software on the device they are introducing to the corporate network. Also, files transferred could include those in breach of copyright, such as music files or pirated software, and companies might not fancy facing possible prosecution for the actions of their employees.

As such, many call centers and other offices where sensitive information is accessed, including some government departments, have now taken to banning such devices. Other extreme measures have included companies pouring glue into USB ports to permanently disable them.

A security industry veteran has even created an application that searches corporate networks for files likely to contain business-critical data and downloads them to an iPod at a rate of around 100MB every two minutes--a process dubbed "pod-slurping."

Flash drives are getting smaller and smaller, and at the same time their capacity keeps getting bigger and bigger. All of this means the chances of losing your flash drive, and of that loss being disastrous, keeps rising.

To guard against that, I've taken the clever step of embedding my flash drive into a regulation sixteen pound bowling ball. Let's see if I send that through the laundry by mistake!

Now that there are several billion different makes of USB flash drives available to buy, some manufacturers are understandably trying new ways to differentiate their drives from all the rest. Of course, at its heart, the disgo lite is your ordinary removable storage device, to which you can drag and drop files as you need them, but it also contains an interesting, relatively new application from a company called U3.

It works by using a small read-only partition on the drive to trick your computer into thinking it is a CD-ROM drive, thereby allowing run the U3 launcher automatically. The U3 launcher can then be used to launch a range of special U3 compatible applications.

The end result is that your humble USB drive becomes a means to transport both files and software to any Windows XP or 2000 (SP4) PC (hard luck Mac users). And that could be a huge benefit to you if you regularly use public/shared, or security restricted (i.e. office), PCs.

A new utility could make U3 'portable program' drives a lot more viable because it configures software to run on the devices..

A U3 drive in theory allows you to carry your favourite programs around and use them on any PC you plug it into.

The major snag is that the U3 only works with compatible programs, or software that has been specially tweaked. This is because most programs look to the host PC's Registry for file locations and other configuration information.

Now Scottish software house Runtime Revolution has produced a utility called U3 Package Prototyper, which is designed to allow developers to make their software U3 compatible.

But Runtime managing director Kevin Miller said it is simple enough for others to use. "The reality [is] that end users have been wrapping applications and while there is no guarantee they will work, most of them do. We've seen people wrap many mainstream applications."

The utility is available as a free download to people registered with the U3 developers site – and registration is free. It is billed as beta code but Miller said in fact it has been finalized.

He added: "Because of this popularity the next step is that we will be releasing this utility on the 'main' U3 software site as a free download for any U3 user -not just developers. That should be happening at some point next week. "

RunTime is offering another U3 utility called AppSnapper that gets round another limitation of the technology by ensuring that if you click on a file it launches the relevant application on the US, not the host PC.

It includes a third utility called CrashZapper that cleans up information on the host computer in the event of a system crash.

AppSnapper, usable on up to three U3 drives, costs $9.95 (about £5) from the U3 Software Central Store.

If you love C3PO more than the baby Jesus, you might want to wear this fancy metallic USB drive around your neck instead of that old cross granny gave you. It comes with a leather strap, looks like man-jewelry, and holds 256MB of memory. You can pick from the following: C3PO and R2D2 in 3D, Darth Vader and Jedi in a black and silver print, or Clone Trooper and Bobba Fett in etched metal. What, no Han Solo in Carbonite?

BANGALORE: His first tryst with programming was in a computer class at St Paul's English School, Bangalore. That very moment he knew he was made for the world of programming.

From then on, Anil Gulecha has been on an aggressive learning mode. The internet and books have been his tutors. He is still learning.

But he has already accomplished a unique feat — that of putting a whole operating system on a thumb/pen drive and enabling it to run live on any computer without having to install it on the computer's hard disk.

In other words, you can now carry your hard disk or your entire operating system in your pocket. This effort takes computing to a whole new level.

Moinak Ghosh, an engineer at Sun Microsystems, Bangalore, recently took the lead on Solaris 10, the flagship operating system of Sun Microsystems, and came up with the version called BeleniX.

As TOI reported in July, Moinak took the whole OS and put it together as an abridged LiveCD version. Thanks to the 20-year-old Anil Gulecha, BeleniX can now "boot from a USB thumb drive."

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Personal storage devices such as USB flash drives are more powerful than ever and have become ubiquitous in the enterprise environment. Originally designed for consumer use, these devices typically lack security, control and auxiliary management tools. Many employees don’t think twice about taking work home or out of the office on the personal thumb drive they purchased at a local center for office supplies. With millions of people carrying around personal storage devices, these gadgets are being used both innocently to increase productivity and for other less legitimate purposes such as smuggling information out of the enterprise.

Even when used with the best intentions, the data stored on USB drives is generally not covered by routine company procedures, such as backup, encryption, or asset management. How can companies keep track of the data coming in or leaving the company via these devices? Keeping company data secure has become a significant challenge for any corporate IT department.