SanDisk unveils tiny Cruzer Blade USB drive

SanDisk has launched a USB Flash drive which it claims is no bigger than a paper clip and as light as a penny.

The Cruzer Blade is designed to be used as a keychain accessory or smartphone dongle, but should appeal to the business market thanks to its high storage capacities of 2GB, 4GB, 8GB and 16GB.

SanDisk said that a 4GB USB Flash drive translates to about 1,000 music tracks, 1,200 high resolution images or eight hours of video. That should extrapolate to hundreds of thousands of PowerPoint slides.

"At half the size of some other USB drives, our compact Cruzer Blade provides consumers with highly portable storage at great value," said Kent Perry, director of retail product marketing at SanDisk.

"The drive lets users transfer their digital data quickly between computers, and delivers a storage boost to devices such as netbooks that often need additional memory but are difficult to upgrade easily."