Home computer use: flash drives, part 1: capacity

Self-tutoring about data storage: the tutor opens a discussion about flash drive capacity.

The following is according to my understanding.

I recall floppy disks. As I recall, one could hold around 1MB of data. When I was a kid (meaning into my early 20s), they were what people used for removable storage. This remained true into the 90s, it seems. Some people started using CDs, including rewritable ones. Yet, it seems the floppy remained important until it was supplanted by the USB drive. BTW: to me, USB drive and flash drive mean the same thing.

For me, the 2000s were a blur, because my kids were born early that decade. I often used old computer equipment: I was still buying floppy disks in the late 2000s, and still using them until around 2013. However, in 2012, I was talking to someone wearing a lanyard with a USB drive hanging from it. I noticed it said 128MB. I imagined 128 floppy disks, and realized that for floppies, this likely meant the end.

Maybe a few years later, I would see 2GB, then 4GB, then even 8GB flash drives in stores. My wife and kids used them. Eventually I even bought a couple of 16GB ones (see my post from April 21, 2016). And so it continued.

Nowadays, I have around four 64GB flash drives in use. Typically they contain backups, recovery disks, or Linux iso files. The other day I went down to buy a couple more, to store iso files on. I was imagining picking up maybe one 8GB and one 16GB, for instance.

The very smallest flash drive I found was 32GB. I inquired at a couple of places if they had any smaller ones. One guy acknowledged that it seemed surprising they didn’t. I ended up buying two 64GB ones, since two 32GB ones would have been nearly the same price anyway.

I was buying two flash drives not because I needed that much storage, but to keep two files separate. That’s often why I use them: to separate, for instance, a recovery disk from a backup disk.

Just for perspective, 64GB might hold around 20480 minutes – around 340 hours – of video, or more than a million pages of word documents.

Source:

memorysuppliers.com

Jack of Oracle Tutoring by Jack and Diane, Campbell River, BC.