The BCD-rockin' USB Smart Flash Drive
By Darren Murph 
posted Sep 29th 2006 12:55PM
posted Sep 29th 2006 12:55PM
Sure, this flash drive isn't covertly disguised as a teddy bear or housing an exceedingly capacious 64GB of storage, but it does have one thing going for it: brains. The aptly-named USB Smart Flash Drive apparently does a little thinking of its own while holding tight to your precious data, and conveys that knowledge via the Bi-stable Cholesteric Display. Although it proudly touts itself as the "world's first smart flash drive," we (and Corsair) would certainly beg to differ. Nevertheless, a little BCD competition never hurt anyone, and this rendition boasts a sleek, black enclosure, 11 character customizable display, on-the-fly readouts of megabyte usage (both numerically and graphically), LCD read / write indicator, write protect switch, and USB 2.0 connectivity. Coming in 256MB (£27.99; $53), 512MB (£29.99; $57), 1GB (£64.99; $123) and 2GB (£74.99; $142) flavors, these bright (ahem) flash drives are available now to keep you posted on just how much (or little) info you're toting.[Via Red Ferret]
What's the point?
Why must all features be "rock[ed]"?
A couple of comments. Carry Computer Company Ltd. of Taiwan and an affiliated Company A-Data (also of Taiwan) were indeed the first to release a USB Flash Drive with a ChLCD (Cholesteric LCD) aka BCD in October 2005 with the Smart Drive as is reviewed here. Corsair has released their product a little later. they also buy from the same source.
They purchase the displays from a licensee of Kent Displays in Asia. I am the President of Kent Displays and we are also selling these drives on our Web-Site at www.nopowerdisplays.com (to US residents, if you are located in other countries you can contact us and we will ship but not directly via the internet site). Our 1 GB drive is $39.95 and the 2 GB is $49.95 plus shipping.
And to Justus's comment the point is to have a label on the drive in case you have more than one and also to know if you have room for files or enough room to add more the drive before you take the time to add them and get a messsage that you are out of space. They may have other uses but those are the ones that are obvious to me.
We are striving to reduce the cost of the displays for the flash drives so that the retail cost of a capacity meter is a only a couple of dollars more than a plain drive without a display.
Er... am I reading that right? These things are 2-3x the price of a very similar Corsair drive?
I must be missing what amazing feature they have that warrants that kind of price differential.
I'm not so sure how this is new, there is an almost identical compusa brand drive on compusa.com for 49.99 .... http://www.compusa.com/products/product_info.asp?product_code=333903&pfp=srch1&tabtype=ts#ts ive been working here for almost a year and I think they have been around that long.