Memorex thinks it has the key to success in the state-of-the-art USB Flash drive market: make products that look like outdated technology. It's FlashDisc, announced less than 24 hours ago, fits drive and USB connector into a casing that looks like a magnetic tape reel from the early 1970s.

The FlashDisc is 5.8cm in diameter and 0.8cm thick, so it's not exactly as compact as pretty much all the other Flash drives out there. Not only that, but the size will make it impossible for rather too many computer users to be able to connect anything to adjacent USB ports, we reckon.

Each FlashDisc has a capacity of a mere 16MB, though Memorex is selling them in packs of three, for $20 a pop. The company is pitching the part as a floppy disc replacement. It reckons there are still plenty of folk out there still making use of 2.88MB diskettes to swap data between machines, and that they'll all go gooey for something with more than five times the capacity and comes in three colours - red, blue and yellow.

Anyone still using 100MB Zip cartridges - let alone the later, 250MB disks - will of course sneer at the FlashDisc's weeny capacity... ®