'Flashy'
technology in USB drives
The basic
design of USB memory sticks may not have altered significantly, but
their capacity and functionality are changing. When
they first came out around the turn of the century, USB flash memory
sticks maxed out at about 128MB, which was enough for about four albums
of MP3s. This was nice at the time, but now we have the 16GB version,
which is enough for about a dozen movies, and thousands upon thousands
of tracks. It
is not that expensive either, coming in under £100 ($205). There are
actually 32GB memory sticks on the market too, but they cost about £1,000
($2,050) because you are paying for bleeding edge technology. It is a
fair bet that in six months time they will cost half as much as they do
now. In
fact a good rule of thumb with memory - and with most technology - is
wait just a little while before putting your hand in your pocket and you
will get much better value for money. This is just as well because they
only last for about a decade before they start becoming unreliable. Connecting drives
Next up is
the EZ drive. The nice thing about these is that they have USB ports on
either side. This means if you have a 2GB stick, want more memory but
have run out of ports on your laptop, you can just keep on adding more
memory. They each show up as a separate drive though. There
is even partition and security functions that make it possible for users
to create password-protected sectors for the storage of personal or
highly confidential material. |
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