I'd not heard of a "thumb drive" as such but looked into similar devices recently. I ended up buying a "6 in one" card reader/writer instead. We already have my dad's digital camera on smart media cards and I've no doubt will end up wth some other device using a different format at some point in the future so this seemed to me to be the better option.

The device is still small enough to fit in my pocket and also has a small sized CD in the case to supply drivers when needed. I'm not sure how much I will use it and agree with John that the storage is not the cheapest per MB but under £20 for the device and smart media cards as low as £10 for 32MB and probably still falling, it seemed quite attractive to me and certainly beats the hell out of floppies!

USB: My mother board has 2 USB ports on the back and an extension socket on the board. The board came with a further 2 USP ports that are mounted on a bit of metal designed to fit in one of the spaces for a PCI expansion slot and cable to plug into the expansion socket. I'm toying with the idea of attempting to cut a hole in the front of the case to take this. It would beat crawling under the desk to get to the back of the machine and (as long as I don't muck up) be cheaper than buying extension cables.