Journal: Experiences with a "U3" USB TravelDrive

Hoping that my own experience with a "U3" enabled USB drive will aid others who have considered a similar purchase based on price and claims of Mac and Linux compatibility:

[Insert Obligatory Caveat Emptor!]

I purchased a "U3" enabled thumb drive yesterday as it claimed to support not only windows, but Mac OS (8.6 or greater) and Linux. The price was right and it supported everything I needed as I run an OS X workstation and we're predominately a FreeBSD shop. This was coupled with my own haste as the vapors had recently escaped from my previous USB thumb drive and it had gone to wherever thumb drives go when the LED quits blinking.

Attempts to exorcise my new drive of the extraneous U3-specific partition (CDFS), and associated windows specific software, quickly dissipated any goodwill I may have felt towards the drive manufacturer in general and their marketing department specifically. My coworkers disgust with the product is still palpable today.

There *is* an uninstaller available from U3.com ('Are you sure you want to do this? Really? If you insist- but it's a bad thing!) but it requires downloading the software onto a compliant windows box and uninstalling from there. Given my work environment, that was a little tougher than it needed to be and the entire experience continues to smack of "Opt Out".

When contacted, the U3 customer service rep noted that he also finds it "annoying" when a manufacturer's packaging suggests complete compatibility with only "a small note about the U3 requirements". He also stated that Mac and Linux versions of U3, and platform appropriate uninstallers, were on the roadmap.

It pleases me that the customer service rep was sympathetic to my plight, but I'd have been far happier if the packaging had mentioned something about uninstaller requirements before I chose to swipe my card and take the drive back to work.

In the wake of this latest exercise in patience and self control, I'm curious if anyone else has experienced (solved?) the problem of attempting to reformat a U3 device on a non-windows platform. Modifying the fstab might prevent auto-mounting the U3 partition on OS X, but that doesn't recover the space.