Currently my USB Thumb Drive of choice is the SanDisk 4GB Cruzer U3 Micro USB Flash Drive. It has a decent capacity, relatively small physical size and the retractable USB connector saves having to worry about losing the cap.

So what is U3? I was hoping you would ask. Without going into technical details the flash drive is formatted in such a way that it can run applications which have been modified for the U3 “platform”. There are a number of applications, including virus scanners, security programs (password managers and encryption) and even the Firefox browser, which have been modified to run from a U3 USB drive.

I noticed quite a number of complaints in the user reviews about the U3 functionality. Fortunately it can be removed – SanDisk has a “U3 Launchpad Removal Tool”.

Here I must confess that I have removed U3 from my SanDisk Flash drive, and replaced it with the free PortableApps suite, which includes a selection of free applications. PortableApps applications are written in such a way that they run from the USB drive and do not write anything to the host PC.

There are also several applications which offer “portable USB stick” versions, and can be installed to a USB thumb drive without U3 or Portable Apps having to be present.