Why does everyone constantly remind me to take my memory with me? It's getting so I can't go anywhere without it. It's in my pocket, in my briefcase and even on my keychain. It's not like I'd lose it or anything!

There are many hardware manufacturers out there very concerned about the possibility of your losing your memory, and they have developed a bevy of products to make sure that doesn't happen. Welcome to the era of portable hard drives and a new generation of flash drives.

I've been playing with a small selection of these drives from Lexar, Verbatim, EDGE and TrekStor and have discovered that, despite a few extra features, they all do the job with a minimum of effort from us.

The basic difference is durability. According to EDGE's Web site, the small, portable hard drives contain spinning platters, which make them more susceptible to damage versus flash drives, which contain no moving parts, making them more resilient to damage.

Lexar JumpDrive Lightning

Lexar's JumpDrive Lightning ($54.99 for 1 gigabyte) is a USB 2.0 flash drive with a twist. In addition to being one of the fastest flash drives on the market, the JumpDrive comes with PowerToGo software installed on it which allows you to install and run Windows applications on the fly. There's no need to transfer the files to your computer to use or view them. The applications needed to do this are preinstalled on the drive. You can also keep you data safe from prying eyes by encrypting it and storing it in secure, password-protected vaults on the drive. There's also a 2 gigabyte model available.

EDGE DiskGO USB 2.0

For those of you who continually lose the protective caps on your flash memory, there's the DiskGO USB 2.0 flash drive ($109.95 for 4 gigabytes) from EDGE. The drive flips up out of its case when you're ready to use it (resembling the smaller capacity pivot drives from Imation). Meant to rival the capacity available in small portable hard drives, it comes with Chrytptarchiver Lite that enables you to encrypt and protect your data. And, according to the manufacturer, it's the only flash drive that comes with a lifetime warranty.

EDGE also has the DiskGo one-inch mini portable hard drive ($99.95 for 4 gigabytes), which is a small USB-powered hard drive with a 7.9 MB per second transfer rate. An 8 gigabyte version is also available.

Verbatim Store 'n' Go

The new Store 'n' Go mini portable hard drive ($99.99 for 4 gigabytes) from Verbatim comes preloaded with Mobile Launchpad, which allows you to launch applications from the drive. As with all of the drives, it is plug and play. Just attach it to your computer's USB port and you're in business. If you need more memory, there's an 8 gigabyte model available for about $50 more. This was the only mini hard drive I looked at that had a plastic, rather than brushed aluminum, housing.

TrekStor USB-Stick CS-D

The smallest external hard drive I played with was the USB-Stick CS-D ($149.99 for 8 gigabytes) from TrekStor. This mini hard drive does everything its competitors do, but there's one feature that sets it apart from the pack --- a red LED light that flickers when the drive is being used. It was also the only drive I looked at that came with a USB extension cable. The only downside is that you need to install a driver to use it with Linux, Macintosh or Windows 98 operating systems.

More information is available at the manufacturers' Web sites.

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