Byte-Size Drives

"What has it got in its pockets?” was a question posed to Bilbo Baggins in J.R.R. Tolkien’s novel “The Hobbit.” Had Tolkien set “The Hobbit” in the 21st century, the answer might have been a few hundred photos, hours of music, several drafts of Bilbo’s memoirs “There and Back Again” and downloaded back issues of The Shire Enquirer, all clipped to his keychain (along with a certain ring).

Despite their diminutive size, USB flash drives, also known as thumb drives, pen drives or flash keys, can hold vast amounts of data. They generally have a USB (universal serial bus) port. Flash drives didn’t gain popularity until USB 2.0—a major speed improvement over its predecessor, USB 1.1—became widely available in 2002. Then something unexpected happened: Flash drives became fashion statements. People started clipping them to the outside of their backpack and wearing them on a strap (lanyard) around their neck. Once manufacturers caught on to what was happening, cool designs and flashy colors became part of the package.

Flash drives are relatively simple to make, and this ease of production has resulted in a wide-open market (at least 37 companies now manufacture them). Today’s flash drives are much larger in capacity than early models were yet often are half the physical size of their predecessors. And the most sophisticated models come with software that helps you secure your data, synchronize files between computers and even run your software safely on someone else’s PC. You can buy a simple 128-megabyte (MB) drive for less than $10 or a 2-gigabyte (GB) drive for around $100.

“I’m so excited that they’ve taken off the way they have,” raves New York Times technology columnist David Pogue. “They don’t need drivers; they’re cross-platform; they’re the perfect technology. And they’re [getting] cheaper and cheaper.”

The growing popularity of flash drives coincided with the improvement of another, already popular technology: hard drives. USB-based micro hard drives that fit easily in the palm of your hand started appearing around 2003. Micro hard drives haven’t caught on in the market the way flash drives have, so there isn’t the same degree of variety, but their capacity keeps increasing. Today most can hold 4GB to 8GB of data, compared with 2GB to 4GB when they were first introduced.

THE RETURN OF SNEAKERNET. Flash drives have resurrected the fine tradition of sneakernet—moving data from one computer to another by physically carrying it on removable media. Sneakernet was supposed to have died with the floppy disk, but thanks to flash drives, it’s back.

All you need to use a flash drive is a PC or a Mac with a USB 2.0 port, which means just about any computer made in the last 5 years. A flash drive will also work, albeit painfully slowly, with older computers’ USB 1.1 ports.

For many folks, of course, more capacity is better, but it is also much more expensive. A no-frills 2GB flash drive could cost three times as much as a 256MB model filled with software for making sneakernet safe and easy.

If you’re concerned mainly with moving reports, documents, portable document format (PDF) files and a selection of photos to show grandma, 256MB is plenty. But if you’ll be carrying your entire photo collection or all of your data, get a 1GB or 2GB flash drive.

Flash drives aren’t yet economical for capacities larger than 2GB. If you need more than 2GB, consider the micro hard drive. These 4-, 6- and 8GB devices are generally more expensive than flash drives, but if you consider the cost per gigabyte, they’re a bargain. You can buy an 8GB micro hard drive for less than $150, whereas you’d be lucky to find an 8GB flash drive for twice that price.

However, micro hard drives are more delicate than flash drives; drop one onto a cement floor and it may never work again. Also, they seldom come with the quality software you get with better flash drives, and they’re physically larger—about the size of a small cellphone.