If you did a double take at the headline, you’re not alone.
The good news is that after years of having our favorite storage and sharing formats – floppies, Zip drives and CDs – go the way of the Dodo (or Zune), flash drives are here to stay and so are thumb drives.
In case you hadn’t already guessed, USB thumb drives and flash drives are really the same thing. Two names, one great device. The origins of the drive date back to 1998. The brilliant engineers at IBM were toying with the idea of replacing floppy discs with something that was more indestructible. The result was USB thumb drives.
Originally, these devices didn’t have much storage. So the CD, which offered 700 Megs of storage at the time, caught on. But flash drives have had the last laugh, offering consumers a staggering amount of memory, up to 256 Gigs right now. In fact, USB thumb drives are so popular that the CD looks a bit archaic.
One of the big benefits of these drives, of course, is their size. If you’ve ever tried to stuff a CD in your pocket you know that it’s quite a chore. And as soon as you sit down, SNAP! With USB thumb drives you can fit 10 or more in your pocket and never have to worry about them breaking. They are really tough.
They are also cross platform. Back in the day, portable media had to be formatted to the device you used it on. If you had a bootleg of a Grateful Dead in concert on your Mac and took it to your friend’s house, you’d get one of those maddening error codes on his PC. No problem with USB thumb drives. Slip one into any USB connection and it’s platform stupid. It will unerringly pop up on the screen as an external hard drive, giving you instant access to the latest compilation from the cast of Glee.
If you were pretty savvy with technology, you could get CDs to rewrite. But there were limits to how many times they could write and often the drive would stutter and burp its way through a burn only for you to discover that you just made another coaster – it didn’t really write and your data went nowhere.
How did USB thumb drives get their name? Oddly enough, it’s because they looked a bit like fingers when they were inserted into a computer. And they were natural extensions of your computing power, so the name stuck. In fact, some companies even make USB thumb drives that look like a human thumb.
Initially, you may look fondly at a stack of CDs, thinking they are a better value. After all, a state-of-the-art 256 Gig flash drive can set you back as much as $700 right now, but look for them to drop rapidly in price in the coming year as they reach the market in numbers. But a 16 Gig only runs about $30 and will outperform and outlast any other portable media on the market.
As you can see, USB thumb drives and their alter ego the flash drive are a great solution for people on the go as well as those who like to back up their work so they can take it from home to the office or from their desktop to their laptop quickly and easily.
And if you still have CDs, not to worry. They make lovely mobiles or coasters for the home and you can always take trapshooting up as a sport.