I saw this tiny drive for $50 after Rebate (at TigerDirect) and after waiting a few weeks, decided it was worth a shot.

I was at a dilemma: I am a college student, and my classes at school use Mac G4s, I have a Dell laptop, and I have custom-built Desktop (with front USB ports). Here were my reasons for the purchase:

* I wanted to be able to take my work between all of my computers, being able to read and write on all of them. (My laptop did not have a CD-RW drive).
* I wanted something compatible with Linux out of the box.
* Most of all, I wanted something I could carry comfortable in my pocket.

At first I was a bit suspicious of a device that claimed to work on all three major platforms. (It is advertised as needing drivers for Windows 98, and unfortunately this is true of all USB drives I know of.)

So I tried it first on my Windows 98 desktop after installing the driver. I copied a few files over. It took about 2 minutes to fill the 128MB. For me that was extremely acceptable. Then I moved it to my laptop, running Windows 2000, and it worked just as plug-and-play should. I copied some files off. (It reads a little bit faster than it writes.) I booted into Linux, and mounted the drive, and was able to read and write just fine. Then, I plugged it into the keyboard USB port of the Mac G4, opened some files off it, and saved some files onto it. No major problems to note.*

If you think a Zip disk is a bit clunky, load, and slow, this product may be for you. I haven't used a floppy disk -or- a Zip disk since I got it in December (four months ago). It also is useful for show and tell: You can take a project (or music files) with you, and just plop them at whatever computer you end up at.

* I had to run ScanDisk on it after copying files from a Mac, but only had this problem once. Perhaps just a fluke, but still necessary to note! No data was lost.

Recommended: Yes