hmmm i think its good... The floppy disk has ruled the portable media segment for a long time. The floppy, in spite of having a meager 1.44 MB capacity found a large acceptance due to its highly portable nature and mainly due to the universal availability of floppy drives. With the advent of new technology and with loads of hard disk space at disposal, file sizes have grown over the last few years thus driving the floppy to its grave and subsequently giving rise to a huge need for bigger capacity, faster transfer rates and more reliable portable storage devices. Add to that economical and more importantly universal compatibility. Several devices that were touted as the successor to floppies have failed on one or more counts and largely due to the broad compatibility factor. One portable device that holds the potential to be a worthy successor is the USB Thumb drive. The USB port is present on almost all motherboards that were released in the past 2 or 3 years. Also with technology getting cheaper and the prices of thumb drives (also known as Pen drives) falling by the week, it is fast becoming the portable medium of choice. The Cool Disk is one such USB thumb drive from the house of Zoltrix. We received their 128 MB and 256 MB models. The package comprised of the USB 1.1 drive, a high quality USB cable, a leather pouch, a neck band, a nice little 8 cm driver/software CD and an instructions manual. The CD contains drivers for Windows 9x and software for formatting the drive and for protecting the data with a password. The drive is automatically detected and configured in Windows ME, 2000 and XP. The Cool Disk is a compact and ultra light device, which weighs around 15 to 20 grams and is equipped with a Samsung flash RAM. It is 7.5 cm in length, 1.5 cm in breadth and under 1 cm in thickness, which justifies its name. Also, the build quality is very good. We connected the drive to the USB port of a PC running on Windows XP and it was automatically detected and configured as a removable storage drive. No special software is needed to transfer data to the drive. You can use the standard drag-and-drop or the Cut/Copy and Paste method, just like your hard drive or the floppy drive, to transfer data to and from the Cool Disk. The transfer speeds were very decent considering that it is a USB 1.1 device. The speed is certainly not as good as your hard disk transfers, but is a lot quicker than a floppy drive. A USB 2.0 interface would have really made it a lot faster. Our 110 MB test file and assorted data took just over 3 minutes to get transferred to the Cool Disk, which amounts to approximately 600 KBps. It took 99 seconds and 180 seconds to run a quick format on the 128 MB and the 256 MB drives, respectively. The drives also have a write protection notch to prevent data from being copied to or deleted from the device. The drives come with very competitive price tags of Rs.3800/- for the 128 MB version and Rs.6000/- for its 256 MB variant. Note that the above prices are street prices. For that price it is a very decent deal. Those in search of a good, economical portable storage device should give the Cool Disk a serious consideration.