OvalleHawkes498
For Floppy Disc to USB Drive
Last week my 12 year old daughter who spends far too much time on computers inquired about "What's a floppy disk?" It seemed quite shocking in my experience that someone who spends a lot time on the computer hasn't heard of a floppy disk.
I remember during my friends' astonishment inside my laptop lacking a floppy drive just 6 years ago.
The short time between my friends' surprise inside my laptop and my daughter becoming computer literate was enough for piece of hardware to go from as being a near-essential a part of any computer to just as one obscurity.
It just goes to show the speed with which hardware alterations in computing.
Even so though, rewritable CDs had become the standard way of transferring data. These were/are very unreliable though, with problems often emerging through software and hardware incompatibilities.
Also around 6 years back, a much more reliable, although more costly, alternative was emerging; the USB drive. This cut back the ability to simply drop and drag files to removable media. It meant files could be copied towards the new drive as simply any folder on the pc also it wouldn't take much longer to do it either. The typical memory size wasn't bigger than a CD around 1GB but tend to be purchased with as many as 8GB.
The only downside of USB Flash drives was the price. While CDs and floppy disks could be bought for pennies, USB drives cost pounds, and lots of them. As we've arrived at expect with technology, over time, increasingly more could be squeezed onto these portable devices and also the prices still drop at a rate unlike anything else. Now you can purchase a 32GB USB Drive for less than £50. To store much data on floppy discs, you'd need over well over 20,000 of them!
What exactly would be the next method to move data around after USB drives? Rewritable Blu-ray discs can store 25GB of data and price around £4 each. The downside is that, as with rewritable DVDs, these suffer incompatibility problems but for the moment, the problem is increased as very few computers include Blu-ray drives.
There's one solution that will eventually see an end to any or all debate over the easy transfer data. The Internet supplies a practically unlimited quantity of storage space, at a fairly low cost per GB. More to the point, as numerous devices have a permanent Web connection, there is no need to physically bring the data media from one spot to another.
A USB drive is currently the quickest method to transfer data. One day the Internet is a perfect solution to all data problems. For the time being although it is held back by relatively slow data transfer rates as compared to the likes of USB drives.
