Portable storage drives popular among child pornography collectors.

Byline: Jessie Seyfer

SAN JOSE, Calif. _ They're small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, and so unassuming that they are sometimes mistaken for lighters.

But portable storage drives are becoming increasingly popular among child pornography collectors, San Francisco Bay Area high-tech detectives say.

"You're seeing this everywhere," said Santa Clara County, Calif., prosecutor James Sibley, who works in the district attorney's computer forensic lab. "What used to be a banker's box of dirty magazines can now be the size of a key chain."

The average drive today holds 128 megabytes of data and costs from $70 to $100. Think of them as floppy disks, except with several hundred times the capacity. With names that reflect their compact size _ ThumbDrive and Cigar Drive _ the devices plug directly into most PCs, and are capable of storing movies or hundreds of digital photos.

Their uses are many. Lexus used them to distribute promotional materials to potential customers. Marketers and business travelers swear by them as a convenient way to transport presentations or other forms of data.

But for child-porn collectors, the drives have made trading and transferring files so easy that they are a perfect fit with their owners' psychology, said Sibley.