Kongtechnology.com

Posted: 22 Jun 2010 09:34 PM PDT

Sushi, rubber duckies, keys and even jewellery, it seems that almost everything and anything has been turned into a design for USB flash drives at one point in time.

With an almost infinite amount of different shapes and sizes USB flash drives have nowadays, it somehow still feels refreshing every time I see new and creative designs for them.

The same is said for the prototype designs of Onur Mustak Cobanli. A Ph.D student of industrial design at Politecnico di Milano in Italy, he has created some of the more amusing and interesting designs for USB flash drives that I have seen in a while.

What I like about Mr. USB is, to quote the designer, ‘when you plug a flash disk drive, the LEDs start blinking, sometimes fast, sometimes slowly, according to data transfered, this is very similar to the heart beat, which itself is the signal of life, emotions and aliveness, beating differently at our different emotional moments.’ I really like the idea of the blinking light to signify a heartbeat, and how can that be better presented that as this flash drive?

Being the complete geek that I am, I am absolutely sold that this Crystals design should have been done aeons ago. How many of you have watched those old Sci-Fi films and saw data-crystals being used as some kind of controller or key? And according to the designer, the crystal actually glows when they are plugged in and working!

How many of you have misplaced or lost your USB flash drive just because you couldn’t remember where you’ve placed or plugged them? Same goes for your keys, so why not put them together? With this Keychains design, at least the next time you forget your keys, you’ll have your USB flash drives with you too. Though I wouldn’t reccommend plugging and leaving your flash drive in a port somewhere and losing your keys in the process.

This Snake design looks more like a toy than a working flash drive, but there is reason behind the madness. Imagine being able to cart around terabytes of storage just within these tiny things. Well, according to the designer ‘up to 127 of them could be serially connected to store Terabytes of storage’. Imagine that.

“Hey, I think someone stuck a dart into your USB port…”

Well, no, that’s just my USB flash drive.

Imagine using this Dart to scare your friends. I know I’d be completely freaked out if I saw a dart sticking out of my CPU.

Who doesn’t want a water-resistant, unbreakable USB flash drive? With the Fantastic Elastic, you don’t have to worry about dropping your flash drive onto the ground or even into water ever again. This flash drive also floats on water. How cool is that?

On that note, what would you like to see made into a USB flash drive?

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