As I Xi It

I ordered myself the Sony Microvault Tiny 4GB. They weren’t kidding when they said it was tiny, it’s a lot smaller that I expected and disappears into the back pocket of my Moleskine. It comes with this girly looking pastel pinky-purple silicone thing to protect it. Can’t say that it’s the fastest USB drive out there, but it does the business. I seem to have so many of these USB things of varying capacities, not entirely sure what to do with this one. It’s too slow to run Linux off it.

Today I’ve been rooting around in my boxes looking for my old external CD-RW (Yamaha CRW2200UX) that I got way back when they just came out (on the bottom it says it was manufactured in October 2001!!!) and it was one of the first ones with USB 2.0. Boy is it heavy, beige and ugly, it costed just over £100. Nowadays, you can pick one up from around £20 with USB 2.0 in a nice, compact and stylish package without the need for an external power block.

It’s amazing how things have moved on. I wonder what’s next for the humble CD/CD-RW/DVD-RW. Will it dissappear in the same way that floppy disks did?

The drive’s about twice the length of a bog standard CD. Next to it on the left is a 250MB Zip drive. Remember those? This one needs an external power supply. Both drives still work, I managed to burn a CD without a hitch. It’ll come in handy when I’ll be installing Windows XP on a Linux netbook which is what I’ll do once I’ve picked one out.