SzymanskiSundberg58
From Nema Wiki
For Floppy Disc to USB Drive
A week ago my 12 year old daughter who spends way 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 a computer hasn't heard of a floppy disk.
I recall in my friends' astonishment at my laptop lacking a floppy drive just 6 years ago.
The small amount of time between my friends' surprise inside my laptop and my daughter becoming computer literate was enough for bit of hardware to visit from being a near-essential a part of any computer to becoming an obscurity.
It simply goes to show how quickly hardware changes in computing.
Even so though, rewritable CDs took over as 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 expensive, alternative was emerging; the USB drive. This brought back the ability to simply drop and drag files to removable media. It meant files might be copied to the new drive as simply any folder on the computer also it wouldn't take considerably longer to do it either. The typical memory size wasn't much larger than the usual CD at around 1GB but could be bought with up to 8GB.
The only real downside of USB Flash drives was the price. While CDs and floppy disks could be bought for pennies, USB drives cost pounds, and a lot of them. As we've arrived at expect with technology, with time, more and more could be squeezed onto these portable devices and the prices continue to drop for a price unlike anything else. Now you can purchase a 32GB USB Drive for less than £50. To keep that much data on floppy discs, you'd need over well over 20,000 of these!
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, just like rewritable DVDs, these suffer incompatibility problems and for the time being, the issue is increased as very few computers include Blu-ray drives.
There is one solution that will eventually see an end to any or all debate over the easy transfer data. The Internet provides a practically unlimited quantity of storage space, at a fairly low cost per GB. More importantly, as numerous devices possess a permanent Internet connection, there is no need to physically bring the data media in one spot to another.
A USB drive happens to be the quickest way to transfer data. Eventually the web is a perfect means to fix all data transfer problems. For the time being although it is held back by relatively slow data rates as compared to the likes of USB drives.
