Have you ever finished a piece of work, saved it, and thought to yourself, how will I store it? Sure, it's saved and sitting on your computer's hard drive, but if you wanted to back it up, what would you do? Look around your office. Typically, you would see a box of floppy disks awaiting use. You would also see those brand new shrink wrapped CD-Rs or CD-RWs. You might also spot one of those 100MB/250MB zip drives. Or, just maybe, if you're like me, you'll have a pile of USB thumb-sized drives with their chords hanging from your shelf awaiting use, which you reach up and grab.
I had one of those thoughts the other day. You know, when you look at something and see a phasing in of one technology and a phasing out of another? It's happening with video tapes and DVDs as we speak. I can remember years ago throwing out a huge box of 5.25 inch floppy disks. Can anyone remember them? Well, I looked over at my shelf and saw a pile of over 50 floppy disks which hadn't been used in nearly a year and a large lockable storage box which fits about another 100 floppy disks, full. I looked at it and then saw the USB drives and you know what? I really wanted to throw out the floppy disks.
Floppy disks were king once. They still are in some places, which even those few and far between who are still holding onto them, will soon come to the realisation: they are simply unreliable. Many will disagree with me. That's fine. I did too a few years ago. But then I bought my first USB thumb drive and haven't looked back since. See, floppy disks are prone to physical damage, dust can ruin them, they're slow, they don't like electronic interference or magnetic fields and... they don't hold much. I think people started realising that when their huge over bloated word documents weren't fitting on their floppies any more. Sure, we tried compressing them, zipping them up, etc but in the end, that was too slow and would only work for a while. What if the zip file got corrupted? That was a nightmare for most. Then they started the transition to CDs.
Now, at the end of the tunnel, we see our storage saviours, USB drives. They're compact, fast, hold over 2000 times the amount that a floppy could (the bigger ones hold more than CDs can too!), hold data for over 10 years (some even guarantee it up to 100 years!) and will be in use for a LONG time! See, most new laptops don't have floppy drives any more But what do they have? Yep, extra USB plugs for all your external adapters, including USB drives!
I've completely switched over to USB drives. I own six and will be getting a seventh soon. They range from 64MB to 2GB. My next one will be a 4GB USB drive. I can already carry more data on me than my first computer could (164MB hard drive)!
They are definitely the way to go from now on. Make the switch. Plug in and use. It just doesn't get any easier.
Martin is a computer researcher, writer and programmer and has been enjoying the industry for the last 12 years. He can be reached at http://www.martincoleman.com
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