Monday, February 28, 2005
USB Flash drives will hold our digital lives
You know those cute little USB flash drives you can get for about $70 AU which hold 512M of data?
Well, they are going to be the future of personal digital storage.
The average user can now easily hold all the documents they have ever written on one of these little devices, and unless you create lots of digital video or create (that means paint/draw/etc - NOT download) a lot of graphics files, then this storage medium is currently the best thing we have for the average user to keep all their info in one place.
There was a horrible period of PC sales from about 1997 to 2002 when the average computer shop offered no wayfor a person to backup their own data - prior to 1997 you could fit almost all your files on a few floppy disks, and after 2002 CDR's where cheap and commonplace (and more importantly, they were included as standard in PC's).
Of course, the problem is that most people dont backup their data to CD on any sort of regular basis - and this is where I see the USB flash drive as being important.
In a few short years (months even - the way the prices are dropping), we'll have 1-4G USB flash drives for under a $100, and this is will be able to handle the storage capacity of 95% of the computer users [remember - this doesnt include downloaded files - if you downloaded them once, then you didnt create it and you'll be able to get it again if the worst comes to the worst.]
We will get into the habit of saving files which we create directly to the USB drive - it will be the 'My Documents' of the future, and it is completely portable (sits in your pocket - or on your keyring) and can have encryption built into them if you are worried about other people reading them.
The main benefit will be - that we will always have our own personal and *useful* information at hand - your favourites list, email and Instant messenger contacts, personal documents (resume, budget, ) all the source code you've ever written - and the best thing is that they act like a normal drive - you simply plug it into a normal computer and bingo - all your info is there.
As long as Moores Law continues as it is, then we will have more than enough storage space for our *important* digital documents which make up our lives and not the hundreds of gigabytes of mostly junk which lives on our hard drives.
Well, they are going to be the future of personal digital storage.
The average user can now easily hold all the documents they have ever written on one of these little devices, and unless you create lots of digital video or create (that means paint/draw/etc - NOT download) a lot of graphics files, then this storage medium is currently the best thing we have for the average user to keep all their info in one place.
There was a horrible period of PC sales from about 1997 to 2002 when the average computer shop offered no wayfor a person to backup their own data - prior to 1997 you could fit almost all your files on a few floppy disks, and after 2002 CDR's where cheap and commonplace (and more importantly, they were included as standard in PC's).
Of course, the problem is that most people dont backup their data to CD on any sort of regular basis - and this is where I see the USB flash drive as being important.
In a few short years (months even - the way the prices are dropping), we'll have 1-4G USB flash drives for under a $100, and this is will be able to handle the storage capacity of 95% of the computer users [remember - this doesnt include downloaded files - if you downloaded them once, then you didnt create it and you'll be able to get it again if the worst comes to the worst.]
We will get into the habit of saving files which we create directly to the USB drive - it will be the 'My Documents' of the future, and it is completely portable (sits in your pocket - or on your keyring) and can have encryption built into them if you are worried about other people reading them.
The main benefit will be - that we will always have our own personal and *useful* information at hand - your favourites list, email and Instant messenger contacts, personal documents (resume, budget, ) all the source code you've ever written - and the best thing is that they act like a normal drive - you simply plug it into a normal computer and bingo - all your info is there.
As long as Moores Law continues as it is, then we will have more than enough storage space for our *important* digital documents which make up our lives and not the hundreds of gigabytes of mostly junk which lives on our hard drives.
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Forgot to mention - none of this will work until the Operating systems allow this to happen seamlessly. That is we should be able to EASILY tell Windows or Linux exactly where to keep our Favourites, desktop items, my documents, etc. and there needs to be a secondary backup for when we dont have our personal USB drives.
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