When I show the USB Flash Bag concept during a talk, somehow the audience always starts to giggle in amazement. But it now seems this concept can be taken much further: the “Funny USB Memory Stick” [petitinvention.wordpress.com] is a design concept proposing to represent the data that is stored on the stick through some sort of colored light effects captured in transparent glass. Accordingly, no lights means no data, while lights filling the glass means there is little to no disk space left. Pink could represent images, blue is for documents and green for movies, and so on.
When the analysis and light programming occurs on the host computer instead of the stick internals itself, it might not be such a far-fetched idea. Once they work out a better name, that is.
A pie chart version, of course, exists as well. Via Core77.