A nice (and economical) alternative to flash memory, especially if you need more than 8GB. This USB-powered drive works fine on both my Dell and IBM Thinkpad Laptops. Both XP and Vista recognize and install drivers for this device without any trouble. Also, I've noticed that this drive seems to write data at a rate about 3 times faster than my USB-2 flash drive (copied 50MB in photos in 4 seconds; the flash drive took about 13 seconds). I haven't confirmed or compared any tech. spec's, this is just what I observed. Lastly, although this drive is larger than a flash drive, it is only slightly larger than a credit card with a depth of about 3/4" in., easily fitting into a shirt pocket. I've only owned this drive for about a month, obviously too early to discuss long-term reliability.