USB Flash Drives Shaped Like Hard Drives – Yes, Really

The USB flash drive is, as ever, the near-ubiquitous target for interesting novelty tweaks nowadays, and from Taiwanese company InfoThink comes a particularly ingenious entry into that section of the store shelf – an 8GB USB 2.0 device dressed up in a casing that looks like a hard drive. Oh, the irony! It's been pretty well received, too – so much so that Amazon.com is, as of this writing, out of stock. One can possibly imagine the huge mob of geeks who had rushed onto the site to grab theirs – an event that will likely repeat itself about twice as quickly when the company finishes making the next batch.

Anyway, InfoThink's drives are, aside from their custom metal shells, pretty generic when it comes to their technical specs – Gigazine reported read speeds of 25MB/s and writes of up to 12MB/s, pretty standard for a drive of this capacity and interface. As you can see in the below photo, the unit contains a very bright blue LED activity indicator and sports a retractable USB connector, completing the illusion when you don't have the unit plugged in. The devices measure 1.4" (L) x 1.0" (W) x 0.3" (H) – probably too thick to have two plugged into a typical laptop at once, unfortunately, but still pretty small.

The drives are priced at a reasonable $21.99 each, and you can look at more photos on this page – distractions while you wait for Amazon to get more in stock, of course.

UPDATE: Thes flash drives are now available and plentiful at Amazon.

(Photos and topic via Gigazine)