Sony has made available a slew of tiny USB flash drives in its Microvault product line, branding these babies as the USM-L. The drives measure in at 0.69 x 0.33 x 2.44-inches and weighing only around 0.32-ounces, who would think that the USM-L flash drives can store as much as 16GB of data? Well, that’s how flash drives are nowadays, the smaller they get, the larger their storage capacities are, and this is particularly true with the Sony USM-L flash drives.

As if the USM-L flash drives were not small enough, Sony even made use of the Click mechanism which makes it shorter when it is connected to your machines. This also enables Sony to do away with the common USB flash drive design that comes with a cap that you have to pull out to reveal the flash drive’s USB connector. With the USM-L, all you have to do is to slide out the flash drive’s body to reveal the USB connector.

It’s very seldom that we hear about Sony coming out with a flash drive product, although we know that it certainly has some data storage devices in its arsenal but these mostly belong to its proprietary Sony Memory stick duo series which are used for most Sony Ericsson mobile phone’s and the PSP. So, it is refreshing to hear about this new USB flash drive which belongs to Sony’s Microvault product line. The flash drive we’re talking about is the USM-LX high-speed USB flash drive.

The USM-LX gives a maximum read-out speed of 31Mb/s which is the USB flash drive standard, is simply fast enough to handle large files – that is store, transfer and share just about anything. Sony has also made some stride in improving this flash drive’s design by using what it calls a “Click mechanism”. This eliminates the need for a USB cap, since all you have to do to connect the USB to your machine is to slide out the flash drive’s body to reveal the USB connector. This adds some convenience to users as it makes the flash drive shorter when not in use.