For it to work, each of the drives would have to be both a mass storage device and a USB hub. Can USB hubs be this small? If each segment has to be 3 inches long to accomodate the dual functionality, a foot long chain of USB drives sticking out the side of your laptop is a bit less elegant than the concept.

I don't think size would be much of an issue. Random googling finds USB2512[1] which comes in a 6mm x 6mm QFN package. It needs a crystal and a few caps. There's probably an equally tiny flash + USB SoC around to bolt onto it.

The hard part would be the board layout (USB2 requires some line impedance matching, afaik) and the actual packaging.

I reckon you could (conservatively) fit the necessary circuitry into 1 or 2 microSD sized cuboids, maybe one above the plug/socket, and one below. Maybe even less if you eschew some of the spec and only support daisy-chaining your own devices.

[1] http://www.smsc.com/index.php?tid=295&pid=23&cid=...

There's also the problem of power. I doubt these devices could be usb spec compliant since what is essentially happening here is an endless chain of bus powered usb hubs.

It is pretty though.

It's not even the first time it was "dreamed" by some designer, with no technical consideration. You cannot actually do that in a standard way. Dan has a nice article on this: http://dansdata.blogsome.com/2010/03/23/for-suitably-small-v...

Unless you want to attach a hard drive to the end of the line, power should be no big problem. I can't imagine the power requirements of a USB hub being that big.

No one has thought of it before because it's not that useful.

If I want to plug multiple drives in, I just do. There is no reason I need to plug them into each other.

Whoever made it probably imagined that the drives would share a filesystem (i.e. one drive letter for all of them) - but did not think it through since doing that is too complicated to be practical.

Some computers don't have many USB ports - the one in the article photo only has two.

I agree that it's not very useful. There's probably a complicated way to achieve something similar using a proper hub, a bunch of sticks, and software. But most people are fine with a bunch of sticks for different things - "my live boot OS", "my music", "my photos", "all my other stuff".

More useful would be a USB stick that came with stickers to describe content - cute little camera icons or music stuff. Or at least a strip that the user can write on (with a pen, not file system) on the case.

As others have said - it is pretty though.

A long time ago (when they weren't dirt cheap) USB sticks came with labels. For some reason the new ones don't. Probably because I don't know anyone that has more than one big USB stick. Why would you need 4 USB sticks? They are slow enough to make them unusable for large data.

I remember seeing something similar to this before. After a quick google search, turns out it's by the same people actually[1].

[1]: http://www.yankodesign.com/2010/03/22/running-out-of-usb-por...