We just got some crazy pictures from DriveSavers, specialists in recovering data from drives that have been squashed, crushed, burned, soaked or otherwise abused. To support victims of Hurricane Katrina, DriveSavers has reduced its fees for anyone involved in the flood who needs to recover data. The photos from some of these recoveries are pretty amazing. Drop us a note to gearhead@gibbs.com with the subject of "drivesavers," and we'll send the pictures to you.

Anyway, our topic this week is USB drives. Curiously, pretty much every vendor of USB drives provides lanyards so you can hang your USB drive around your neck. This is a great way to emphasize your geekness - to complement your cell phone holster on your hip, iPod (a nano, one hopes) on your other hip, the white earbud headphone cable draped across your shirt, laptop in one hand, and a CrackBerry and a diet soda in the other.

Of course, should you bend down in the middle of the office to check a cable or something and spill your soda, you'll probably drop the CrackBerry into the spill. You go to grab that only to send your iPod flying, but because it is tethered to your ears, it swings around in an arc and smacks you sharply in the nose starting a nosebleed. This makes you reach for the nearest tissue box with the other hand, and you snag your cell phone on your cuff and send it flying into the next cubicle, where it destroys the monitor of a senior programmer, ultimately causing a two-month delay in shipping the next release. But you can rest easy because you have that drive on that lanyard and at least you will have something to hang yourself with.

We just got in a batch of USB drives, and we're impressed. They are becoming really impressive in terms of capacity and the sophistication of value-added features, not to mention that the prices are plummeting. We figure they now average around 10 cents per megabyte compared with, for example, 17 cents per megabyte for floppy disks.

All of the drives are USB 2.0 compatible and rated at around 1 million write cycles, after which they explode. Just kidding.

Anyway, for some background on USB drive technology, we point you to an interesting albeit slightly old story on Ars Technica and in particular their tests on the performance of USB drives.

In our batch of drives we got a couple that are storage only: The SimpleTech Bonzai Xpress USB 2.0 Flash Drive comes in a curvy package with a tiny write-protect switch on the side and a discrete green light on the top to indicate when the drive is in use. This snazzy drive is available in capacities ranging from 128M bytes (as low as $17) up to 2G bytes (around $140).

SimpleTech also sent us the Bonzai USB 2.0 Upgradeable Flash Drive, which is really a holder for Secure Digital or Multi Media Card flash memory cards. The holder without a card is priced around $8, while one with a 1G-byte Secure Digital card costs around $91.

Verbatim's Store 'n' Go USB Drive and Kingston's DataTraveler Elite drive come with what appears to be the same software but with a branded user interface for each vendor. The software provided on the drive consists of a user-driven (as opposed to automatic) data synchronization manager (Verbatim's V-Key, Kingston's MyTraveler) and a partition manager (Verbatim's V-Safe, Kingston's TravelSafe+) to divide the drive into public and password protected and encrypted private areas.

The software in both cases is perhaps a little simplistic, but used routinely by your mobile users it will surely reduce those panic calls. Even if you can't get them to be smart about using the drives for backup, they are a great way to distribute software, patches and content securely.

Verbatim's Store 'n' Go USB drives range from 128M bytes (from around $19) to 2G bytes (as low as $142), while the DataTraveler Elite range starts at 256M bytes (from $39) to 4G bytes (about $360).

Drive your thoughts to gearhead@gibbs.com. As always, check Gearblog.