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Monday, November 19, 2012

32GB Flash Drive Smaller Than A Dime


In the computer world - memory storage is the name of the game. My very first computer was a Timex. It had 4k bytes of main memory. Next came 55k floppy disks - then Apple released the mini-floppy which held 450,000 bytes. My very first hard drive held 20MB or megabytes. Portable zip disk drives held 100 megabytes of data. Now my iMac holds 500GB or gigabytes of memory storage. Even my MacBook Air laptop holds 64GB of memory. 

1 gigabyte equals 1000 kilobytes equals 1,000,000 megabytes equals 1,000,000,000 bytes. So 1 GB equals a billion bytes of information.

I just purchased from Amazon.com a tiny flash drive that holds 32GB or 32 billion pieces of data. Yet the whole thing is smaller than a dime. This equals comes out close to 64 million typewritten pages of data.

They call it flash memory - it has no moving parts. It does not have to have electricity to power it to keep the data in storage. When you plug it into your computer - all of the data is available for you to search. It can also be erased or corrected - every single page of data - individually. Or the whole thing can be erased in seconds.

It is so small that when plugged into the side of my computer - only a small black plastic handle about 1/8 inch wide sticks out as a handle. It is excellent for transferring data form one computer to another - or for creating a backup of pictures or files. What can store an entire computer startup system on this tiny flash drive and use it to start the computer in an emergency. 

With all that ability - this little dime-size item is a super bargain at $23.00. Next year at this time - they will cost $12 - the next year $6 - and pretty soon they will be as disposable as a Chicklet gum. It is an excellent xmas present to your computer nut friend. Who said good things do not come in small packages?

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