San-disco
This is a great USB flash drive once you’ve broken it…
I have a new flash disk. The previous one held a whopping 128mb which in these days of expanding data is a bit like having a floppy disk again. It also crashed perfectly stable computers when you plugged it in, not a particularly useful feature.
Photo courtesy of Sandisk
As a digital camera junkie, I own more Sandisk memory cards than you can shake a large bundle of sticks at; so getting a Sandisk flash drive seemed like a no-brainer... Let’s call that mistake number one. I read up about the Cruzer on the Sandisk web site. It features a technology called U3 which if you own (or have access to) a PC, allows you to launch applications from the Cruzer. It’s handy (probably) but of no interest to me as a Mac user. I assumed I could remove the U3 software from the Cruzer without much trouble... We’ll call that mistake number two.
“…let’s call that mistake number one…”
The obvious answer appeared to be a simple reformat using Apple’s disk utility… No, that would have been far to easy. It seems some kind of wicked voodoo technique has been employed to install the U3 nonsense. Fortunately Sandisk have made software available which will remove U3 completely from the cruzer. A prayer answered for non-PC users? No, it only runs on Windows… Geez guys, you’re not being very friendly…
“…geez guys you’re not being very friendly…”
My options were a bit limited. I could find a PC owning friend but that would take time or I could fire up Virtual PC and try my luck… It worked! I ran the U3 exorcism utility under Virtual PC and… okay what actually happened was it went swimmingly until about half-way through the process when the de-installing utility choked claiming it couldn’t see the Cruzer anymore. That was the point at which I figured I may have hosed my new toy… I quit Virtual PC and headed back to the Apple disk utility and there it was… sighs of relief all round. I reformatted and lo and behold U3 was no more…
Post exorcism I’m loving this thing. It’s fast and small and it’s made out of titanium which means it will stop bullets and… okay possibly not the bullet thing, but it is strong… The most ingenious feature is the retracting USB plug. Instead of a cap you simply push the connecter out when you need it and pull it back into the drive when you’re done, cool. The sad thing is I’m more impressed by a simple mechanism than having 4 gigabtyes of storage in a unbreakable minature package…