Buffalo unveils “entry-level” flash drives with 4 gigabytes

You know flash drives have come a long way when an “entry level” batch of products includes a four gigabyte behemoth. That’s exactly the case from Buffalo today, as they unveiled the RUF2-E line of USB thumb drives. As they are the company’s budget-minded set of portable storage solutions, you shouldn’t be expecting anything particularly groundbreaking here. No fingerprint reader. No included security software. No X-ray vision.

Instead, what you get is a rather unassuming transparent bluish-purple casing which holds your standard fare of music, movies, text documents, PhotoShop files, and the like. I guess the “cap loss prevention mechanism” – which Digital World Tokyo is guessing is simply some sort of tether – is a little special.

Measuring 73 x 18 x 9 mm, they’re right in line with some of the smallest USB drives on the market, but easily not the smallest. The same can be said about the 10 gram weight. The RUF2-E starts at 128MB (about 17 greenbacks) at the low end and, as previously mentioned, at 4GB ($415) at the high end.