Personally, I use a mini portable hard drive for my mobile storage needs, more because of cost efficiency reasons than anything else. That said, flash memory is getting cheaper and cheaper these days, and they’re able to cram more and more storage into tinier and tinier packages. The latest from Buffalo certainly isn’t the most diminutive thumb drive on the market, but it does manage to pack in eight gigabytes of data.

Measuring 19 x 91 x 14mm, the RUF2-R-S USB key weighs in at a feather-light 20 grams, an important factor when it comes to portable storage. Obviously, this unit is USB 2.0 compatible, and they’re reporting a write speed of 32MB/sec, with read speeds not far behind at 27MB/sec.

We’re not really sure when this handy drive will be available, but we suspect that it will start out as a Japan-only release. They haven’t announced a price point either, so in the meantime, you’ll just have to pick up one of the many other high capacity products on the market.