The MosKeyto's Buzz

A review of a USB drive might seem like a silly notion, but when the USB drive is barely bigger than the USB port itself, it seems worth mentioning. I recently was sent a LaCie MosKeyto USB drive, and I must admit, it's even smaller than I expected it would be. In fact, the cover to the Flash drive is actually bigger than the drive itself!

Because the drive is so small, it makes sense to keep it on a keychain. Most of my USB drives started with a cap, but after about three or four minutes of use, I would lose them. The LaCie drive has a neat keychain strap that secures both the drive and cap onto your keyring. So, if you're looking for a non-obtrusive USB drive to leave plugged in to your laptop, or if you want a portable Flash drive that won't dominate your keyring, the MosKeyto might be just the device you need. It also comes with some Wuala on-line storage, but really, what's exciting is how small these things are. They must compress the data or something—just teasing, it's obvious they fold the data to make it fit. Visit for more info.

Associate Editor Shawn Powers and His MosKeyto




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Daevid Vincent's picture

Surely the combined brain power at Linux Journal can figure out a way to prevent the spam posts to these stories no? Even a simple 'captcha' would suffice to reduce it by an order of magnitude...


Associate Editor Shawn Powers

replica's picture

Associate Editor Shawn Powers

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I bought this super tiny

Daevid Vincent's picture

I bought this super tiny micro 8GB USB thumb-drive from Fry's for about $45. I can't tell you who made it as the letters have all worn off, but I absolutely love it. It's about 1" long, and has no metal around the USB plug, it's all plastic. It might be the same one "Corfy" says he has. It's black with a metal band around three sides (they should have done all four sides b/c I just noticed the one plastic side is cracked!) I think the company started with an "i" as I recall....

oh wait. here it is!

Yeah. love this thing. saved my bacon a few times to have documents on it when I needed them, an Ubuntu .iso, DBAN .iso, truecrypt volume, and even use it to 'sneaker-net' GB files (that took WAY too long to transfer over 100Mb LAN)... With 8GB, you have room to spare.

Not as thin as my imation atom

Daevid Vincent's picture

I just received this MoskeyTo 16GB drive and I have to say, it's not as thin as I'd hoped. It's actually too thick to carry on my key chain compared to my imation atom drive, especially with the little shelf parts that stick out around the edges. Instead, I'm just shoving it in my Dell E6500 USB jack and keeping it there. It seems it's more designed for that scenario since it's more squashed/flat, whereas the atom is more thin. Bummer, that imation doesn't make a 16GB one (yet):

Didn't want to link

corfy's picture

I didn't want to link to mine cause I was afraid it would be flagged as spam. Apparently, that isn't a problem, so here is mine, the Verbatim Tuff 'n Tiny:

That is exactly the one I have (size and color). I probably would have picked up one with more storage, but this was a gift, so I'm not complaining. Of course, that is just one of four flash drives that I regularly carry around with me (two 8 GB, this 2 GB, and a 1 GB, each with their own purpose).

Laugh at life or life will laugh at you.

No offense to Shawn, I typically like your stuff...

Bemis's picture


To those saying "where's the review?"... technically he didn't see he was going to review it, just that he was going to mention it... which he did... ;-D

After using some abysmally slow keys I won't buy one until I see a comparison of it vs. a few well known competitors... so although it's interesting to see how small this is, the old saying is still true: size isn't everything :)

you forgot something

Mozai's picture

You forgot to mention the capacity of the device. Kind of odd to see a product review of a storage device without mentioning it's primary attribute.


tagMacher's picture

does it come with a write-protect switch? I am looking for a drive with write-protect capability. While USB drives are a great convenience, I am just paranoid enough to re-format (on a Linux system, of course) whenever I use one on someone else's computer.


tehmasp's picture

I've used Kingmax's USB drives. They have the USB connection flush with the casing. It's super slim and the size of a piece of Trident gum.

I need a new USB drive actually and might go with the MosKeyto since it would be cool to have the drive flush with my laptop and not sticking out - my only gripe with my Kingmax.

Another thing with a slim USB key is that I like to carry encrypted critical Docs, etc. in my wallet. Not a fan of keychains.

Thanks Shawn.



corfy's picture

"A review of a USB drive..."

So... where's the review? Did it work OK? How does it compare to (physically) larger USB drives?

My first 8GB drive (back before they were as mainstream as they are now) was great for putting really large files onto it, but if I had a bunch of small files to put onto it, it took forever. A 700 MB ISO copied onto it in a couple of minutes. 130 text documents (with a couple jpgs mixed in) totaling about 40 MB took over an hour to copy onto it (I'm not exaggerating... I was ready to pull my hair out). It didn't do too bad at reading, however, so I tolerated it for a while (I no longer have it).

But I, too, have a USB drive that people have a hard time believing it is real. It is longer than this one (officially 1.2"), but it a lot thinner (.08") with no cap (and no metal frame around the USB connection, which helps make it thinner, although it is easy to stick in the port upside-down). It is about half the size of an SD card. Mine is only a 2GB, but it comes in larger sizes (and performance-wise, I haven't had any problems with it).

Laugh at life or life will laugh at you.

Concur. Numbers would be good

tehmasp's picture

Concur. Numbers would be good :).
With everything a smart geek is going to look at multiple reviews and feedbacks before buying :).

My Apologies. :)

Shawn Powers's picture

I wasn't anything special. It was just a plain old USB drive like the other 15 laying on my desk. It never occurred to me to run the numbers, as the only thing unique was its size. :)


Small memory, no not my own.

bpalone's picture

Yes, it does appear to be small. I also am amazed at how small and how much data can go on a micro-sd card. Maybe, it's because I'm old enough to remember when a 4 gig hard drive was huge, and I thought that I can never fill that up.

I agree it would be great if you need to have an unobtrusive USB storage device attached to a laptop, it would be great.

agree it would be great if

AlfredBloomberg's picture

agree it would be great if you need to have masturbateur an unobtrusive USB