Remember the 3.5" floppy drive? It held a ton of data back in the day remember?!?! If you compare it to a USB drive today, they can hold hundreds if not thousands of those old disk drives - isn't that crazy?
You may have seen other people with them, you might even have one of your own. They’re the newest and most convenient way to store data and they look like these:
They also go by various names: USB Drives, Flash Memory, Flash Drives or even Thumb Drives:
Here's a link to the top 10 weirdest looking USB drives:
http://gadgets.fosfor.se/the-top-10-weirdest-usb-drives-ever/
What you need to know about USB Drives:
- They go by several names: Thumb drives, flash drives, flash memory, SanDisk drives. The most official name would be just “USB Drive”
- They have much greater storage capacity than old fashioned floppy disks and are easier to carry than CD’s.
- They plug into the USB ports of any computer here at school
- There are two “speeds”: USB 1.0 and USB 2.0 (2.0 is faster and all new USB drives are 2.0)
- They come in these standard sizes: 128MB,256MB, 512MB, 1GB,2GB. Most recently USB drives have gotten much larger by the way.
- Prices for USB drives range from $6-$129. If a 512MB USB drive costs about $12 that equals about $.02 per MB. Compare that to the price of an old fashioned 3.5” floppy diskette which holds 1.44 MB's and could cost you about $.20 per MB.
