Though cloud storage has made drive-based storage seem a little like an also-ran, local, portable, physical storage still has a place. So it’s good companies still try to improve it. TeamGroup has released three speedy new USB-3.2 flash drives, including one that carries the name “Extreme Speed.”

Have you ever wanted to try out a different operating system on your Mac? Ever since Apple started using Intel chips in their computers, it’s been super simple to run Windows and even popular Linux distributions via Boot Camp, virtual environments like Parallels and VMWare Fusion, and the like.

The problem is that you need to use up precious system resources to run these things on your Mac. Even virtual machines take up disk space, as does running Boot Camp and partitioning your main Hard drive. What if you just want to test something out on your Mac before fully committing?

Turns out it’s fairly easy to run Linux on your Mac without using up any bit of your hard drive. Using a flash drive and some Terminal commands, you can check out a distribution like Ubuntu running right on your Mac without having to sacrifice a thing. Here’s how.

Here’s something you don’t see often: It’s an Android phone sporting a 30-pin connector. Blasphemy! Heretical! Nonsense. PhotoFast’s i-FlashDrive, which allows fast transfer of files between Android and iOS, is here to promote peace and understanding between all — even the heathenish Windows.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2013 – This is one of those simple ideas we’re surprised no one has come up with before. The PhotoFast i-FlashDrive HD is a flash drive with two different interfaces at each end — one 30-pin, one USB — that makes it super-easy to tranfer files between a desktop and anything with a 30-pin connector. It’ll also work with a Lightning connector through a Lightning adapter.

There are plenty of reasons to want to encrypt the data on a hard drive. Before OS X Mountain Lion, Apple provided tools to do this with the startup drive, via FileVault. Starting right now, however, with OS X 10.8, you can encrypt almost any external drive you like, including flash drives (also known as thumb drives in my neck of the woods). Here’s how.

One of the big fears CIOs and IT staffers have about the consumerization of IT and BYOD trends is that mobile devices like the iPad and iPhone combined with personal cloud services like iCloud, Google Docs, and Dropbox make it very easy for confidential business data to leave the office and the company network.While this is a definite fear for IT staff, how do most knowledge workers view the risk and the consequences of such so-called data sprawl?

According to a recent study, four out of five workers rank removing confidential data from the office as an offense that should get a person fired and yet 90% believe that it happens on a regular basis.

For users who work with both Macs and PCs, having a flash drive that can work between both and seamlessly transport files can be critical. The tricky part is choosing the filesystem that provides the best interoperability between both computers. In this video, I’ll show how to format a flash drive for both Macs and PCs the right way.

LaCie’s latest, the MosKeyTo thumb drive — get it? Har. — is a product that manages to pull off the nearly miraculous: it’s not only just 20mm long, or about the same size as the nanoreceiver of some wireless mice, but it’s actually garnered our interest enough to break our oath and yet again hit the keyboard to write something about the most boring species of gadget on earth: the USB storage dongle.

It’s not the specs, which are standard. It’s not the price: 4GB for $17.99, or 8GB for $27.99. It’s not even the drive’s tininess. No, we’re writing about it to call attention to the official product image above, featuring a giant mosquito wildly fornicating with its namesake on the lid of a MacBook Pro.

Congrats on catching our attention, LaCie! Time to give someone in your art department a raise.