PR and marketing departments, take note. The new 1:11 USB Copy Tower SA from Aleratec offers a way to duplicate the same information to multiple USB flash drives, and no PC or other equipment is required. The $1,575 device will copy, compare or erase up to 11 flash drives simultaneous, with a backlit LCD screen for an interface. The company says it can make 11 exact copies of a 256MB flash drive in under 2.5 minutes.

The device includes a progress monitor and lights that indicate the status of each USB drive attached to the unit. The system supports asynchronous USB duplication (after you load a source drive, each target channel can be independently loaded with drives to be copies), as well as synchronous duplication (up to 11 copies made at the same time). A bit-by-bit Compare function confirms that successful copies of the USB drives are made.

If you've ever had to sit at a computer and copy information onto a USB drive over and over and over again, this device may make for a simpler process.