Sunday 30 October 2011

Reasons To Use A USB Flash Drive

By Andrew Johnson


Every day, whole terabytes of data are written to hard drives in computers and portable media attached to laptops and desktops. The amount of information people trust to hardware these days is absolutely staggering. Whole books work of documents containing the written word are placed into the hands of technology every single day for safekeeping. There are enough photos to fill thousands of family albums which are saved down daily. And audio and video is placed on these items at such a prodigious pace that it could broadcast output for almost all the world's television and radio stations non stop. But more and more people are shying away from the old ways of storing data on a computer, and moving towards a USB flash drive.

These memory sticks used to be expensive and not very spacious when it came to storage. They were the next logical step up in storage. The maximum amount of data one could store on them used to be minimal - something like 128MB.

Even those earlier versions which did not have much storage space were preferable to what came before them though. At first with the initial computing technology was the floppy disk (a misnomer of a name if ever there was one). This could only store 1.44MB of data. They were not very useful at all.

The disks themselves quickly shrunk, but did not get bigger in terms of space. For a short period in the 1990s, it looked like there might be a young usurper, called the Zip disk. However this also required expensive add ons and was quickly thrown out as poor uptake counteracted its increased storage.

After that, it was the turn of optical media. People began burning CDs and DVDs in their droves - not entirely successfully. They were good and stored more information, but were temperamental.

A new word entered the lexicon because of this capability. People around the world were proud, through gritted teeth, to make their own coaster. This was because an error in writing the disc or damaging it left it with no more use than as a place to put a coffee mug.

There was salvation when memory sticks hit the market. In just a few years, they have become incredibly commonplace and are now the go to way to move files from one computer to another. Their small size and large storage space works in their favor.

Everyone seemingly uses a USB flash drive these days. The size of the data that can be stored on them is now enormous. People are using them in their droves.




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