OK, one for the UK people. Where is the cheapest place I can get decent quality 2-4GB flash memory cards, and 1GB USB memory sticks? Or, perhaps I should say, where is the cheapest reputable place that will actually deliver the things after taking my money?

pca

Here in the US flash memory fell through the floor two weeks ago or so. If you havn't had the coresponding price drops, it may be worth it to order it from over here.

A slow san disk 4GB CF cards are going for $150 with a $20 rebate. Fast ones are about $175. You can get a 1GB USB drive for $33 with $10 in rebates.

Any recommendation for a good fast SD card, around 1GB? I can find all sorts of prices, I just don't know which cards are faster than which others.

Robgalbraith.com has SD cards in their database if you check out a camera that takes SD cards, like the Canon 1D mkII.

Matthew

Amazon.co.uk have a 1GB Sandisk Cruzer Micro for about £30. Its TINY.

Multiwave in California has the Cruzer Micro for $49 Too bad I cheaped out and got some 512's, the prices are droping daily.

What I find neat about the micros is that you can take a sharp knife or razor and slice the gummy blob off from around the metal case. That slims them down and they fit nicely on the key chain.

Can't figure why nobody has sold them like that to start.

On the latest few Micro's I bought (for work), the soft plaster outer covering slips right off. That leaves the entire drive the thickness of the USB connector. They even come with two alternate color sleeves/caps, which are a great replacement if you loose the cap or scratch it.

The older Micro's (no, not possessive, pluralization of a brand name) had the sleeve fixed in place, I think. I'd check, but my co-workers have them now.

And CURSE their engineering department for having such a well lit activity light on the end. If only I had that knowledge.

This is the best one I have seen to go on a key chain. I'll probably get one soon since I finally lost my 256M key.

PQI has a 'housing-less' USB drive that is thin enough to fit unnoticed in your wallet.
Here's a page from a thumb drive mega review from October:
http://www.anandtech.com/memory/showdoc.aspx?i=2549&p=17

I was always enamored of the OCZ Rally, but I'm still waiting for the prices to hit bottom.
I'm just a cheep b@stard like that.

There was one particularly good comment in there with a big list of programs. Thanks! I also followed that site to this site, however, and that is a great page. Thanks for the link!

Yup- that was the biggest nugget.
You're welcome!

I have two suggestions for keychain ones: the "Geek Squad" (ugh) one, which is cool because of the integrated cap, and the Swiss Army Knife one.

I also have the PQI Intelligent Stick one, which works really well, and is quite small, but I find that the wallet case is less than spectacular. It's a little too thick and is made of fairly brittle plastic. Mine still holds onto the thing only because I have it pointed down into the card slot. That said, the USB key itself is undamaged.

I'm about to purchase a 4GB MMC card for my Nokia 6230 so I can use it like a cheap iPod nano for my law-enforced 2 hour commute to work. Can also use it in my digital camera then. US$142 shipped to Australia on ebay (Flashman852 I think is the seller). They just dropped about US$30 in price in the past couple of days.

But then some people are against Paypal/Ebay. Personally I've haven't had any major problems but I'm also fairly cautious. As long as you are patient and don't get into bidding wars I find ebay OK. The above mentioned ones are Buy-It-Now anyway.

Wow, flash really has fallen through the floor! $99 for 4GB USB is crazy. I carry around a 4GB microdrive-based unit which is a little bulky. Maybe it's time to downsize...

4GB USB2 Flash drives (including that one) are still over twice that in the UK.

I've looked at those, without the shield, models. It just strikes me that the contacts are subject to too much wear, tear and contamination.

No doubt it's an entirely irrational opinion.

I also have the PQI Intelligent Stick one so far I've been very happy with it

My only gripes are

I wish they made a higher capacity version, and it had a loop for key chain atachment.

2GB Apacer stick, CDN$132. That's what I just purchased locally here yesterday.

26-30MByte/sec read speed, about 35% of that when writing. FAST. Faster than the hard drives in my Empegs, but not quite as swift as the 100GB spinner unit in my Dell i9300.

So for fun, I installed Knoppix-4.02 onto the flash stick. Faster than a CDROM, but not by much. WTF?

Dug around briefly, and discovered that Knoppix screwed up the USB drivers -- the EHCI (USB2 hispeed) driver was not being loaded at boot time. After a brief amount of digging thought the minirt.gz (boot-time ramdisk file), I found the culprit: a simple typo. Fixed that, and now it starts real quick like -- boots up into OpenOffice.org much more quickly (like 10X-15X more quickly) than the native Kubuntu hard disk install on the same machine.

Cool.

Cheers

16GB thumb drive announced today... man I wish they'd hurry it up with the capacity wars. I can't wait to slap 80gb of flash in my empeg. =]

That'd be an option, but CF cards speak IDE, all you need is a simple adapter.

Hmm,