Lexar JumpDrive Firefly 8 GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive JDFF8GB-431 (Charcoal)

This is a very compact and reasonably fast thumb drive -- actually about the length of *half* a thumb. It consists of two parts: the "drive" itself and a plastic "caddy" or "scabbard" it snaps firmly and deeply into (about 60% or so of the drive nestles iside the caddy afterwards.) The caddy has a lanyard-loop at the top you can snap onto your key chain or lanyard to retain it. One obvious misgiving: plastic eventually degrades and breaks in my experience, possibly long before the drive itself does, leaving you with no way to attach an otherwise perfectly usable device to your keychain or lanyard. However, the plastic caddy seems thick and strong, the fit with the drive seems firm as well, so for now I'll give it the benefit of the doubt. Besides, I've had lanyard-loops built into the drive break as well, so who knows what would be better in the long run?

I use this on both Macs (10.5.2 and 10.4.x) and PCs (WIndows XP and Server 2003), no problems. USB 2.0 support and 1.1...Read more

The Firefly is easily the best USB drive available right now. It may be slightly more expensive than some of its competitors, but the form factor makes up for the extra cost.

This drive is smaller than most, making it much more comfortable in the pocket, on your keys, or those hard-to-reach USB ports on computers.

The see-through connector-cap / keychain attachment is amazingly sturdy and makes it as easy to remove from your keychain as a simple tug and yet in over a year of buying firefly drives I have never had one come free from the keychain cap unintentionally.

I own a car stereo that allows me to play music from any USB device and being able to tug my MP3 loaded Firefly free while I'm driving without any trouble and plug it straight into my system has been extremely convenient.

No moving parts that swivel, slide and (inevitably) break from wear and tear. Plus it works flawlessly in both my Mac OS and Windows computer systems...Read more

I've been using Lexar Jumpdrives since they came out with some of the earlier 128MB thumb drives and progressed from 1GB, to 4GB and now the 8GB Firefly. I've passed my older drives on to family members to use for school or work. The 8GB drive works great (and smaller than a dual layer DVD-R). I use these drives regularly when I just need a few files around. I have tried a couple different brand names on occasion, but always come back to the reliability of the Lexar brand. I generally use Windows OS, and have used the 8GB drive to transfer files from Windows XP to Windows 64-bit Vista as well as pulling log files off of rack mounted servers at times (Windows 2000 and 2003). SO far I haven't found any trouble using the drive on any of these operating systems. Just plug it in, give it a few seconds to be recognized by the system and start copying files. Also use one of these as a system "first-aid" drive with various anti-virus and anti-spybot software that can be loaded on systems...Read more