Exploded the boom of memory sticks
By alberello
@alberello (4752)
Italy
December 9, 2011 6:09pm CST
Dear friends, I wanted to talk about a topic relating to technological progress, even in a domestic environment.
At one time there were the tapes, then supplanted by the advent of DVD.
These shiny discs have had great success for both the video quality, both for the large amount of memory which could generate.
Now here comes instead, at affordable prices to all the so-called memory sticks.
You can find of all brands and for all sizes, even up to 4 GB to 64 GB.
These devices are very convenient because they are small, easily transportable, compatible with all computer systems and apparatus for audio-video playback.
Besides being the memoirs of electrical and not mechanical (as they were hard drives) are faster to write and erase data.
I personally own 3 each of 8 Giga, and for example if I have to bring a movie from one computer to another, the operation is simple with the copy / paste without using any program as was the case for DVDs.
Moreover, these memory sticks are practically usable indefinitely.
What do you think of these useful devices?
1 person likes this
1 response
@dodoguy (1292)
• Australia
10 Dec 11
Hi alberello,
Just to clarify, here's what I believe has been the progression of portable recordable storage media (at least as related to personal computers):
1. Magnetic tape / tape cassette.
2. Manetic disc / floppy disc (8", 5.25", 3.5").
3. Optical disc / CD, DVD, BlueRay.
4. Potable hard drives.
5. Flash memory card / Smartmedia / Compact Flash / SD etc.
6. Flash drive / memory stick.
Those are the main ones that I know about.
The portable flash drives or memory sticks are certainly very portable and very convenient.
They are available up to 640 GByte now, and 256 GByte memory sticks are fairly common, but they are still quite expensive compared to portable hard drives.
One outstanding benefit of flash drives is their longevity - a great deal of data can be stored on a tiny device more or less permanently (for at least 10 years). This is similar to the expected life of optical media such as CD / DVD, but those items are much more fragile and less portable than flash drives.
Flash drive use of the USB interface also makes for easy access to stored data.
One drawback with flash drives is the limited write cycles available on each device. This means they can't be used in the same way as a hard drive (for example) for intensive use, because the flash drive's lifespan is degraded by continually writing data. Of course, a flash drive can be used as a data drive, because the number of write cycles available does allow for a lot of use (typically a few years before it runs out of write cycles) but it is finite, and intensive writing of new / modified data will shorten the device life.
So the ideal use of a flash drive would probably be for storage of large data files which aren't going to change (ie, will only be read in normal use, and not modified too often). Entertainment media such as movies and music is a perfect match for that. But any data files, of any sort, which the user wants to archive for a long time, would also be ideal for a flash drive. Examples might be tax records, dictionaries and encyclopedias, image files of CDs and DVDs for computer games and applications, photo albums and image collections.
I'm personally hoping to see flash drive prices reduce so that 256 GByte and larger devices become affordable in quantity. There's a lot of stuff I'd like to have stored away for the future.
@alberello (4752)
• Italy
11 Dec 11
Dear friend, have you ever thought about this: how much data you think a person and how much material could be stored in a memory stick of 256 Giga?
Well maybe a lifetime of memories locked up in a few centimeters in size.
Imagine that for a misfortune that stick it fail! Result: all is lost!
As you can see in this case could occur problems with consequences not just indifferent.
@dodoguy (1292)
• Australia
13 Dec 11
Hi albarello,
You are very sensible to consider that risk.
I would like to have all my CDs, DVDs and other important records stored on a couple of large flash drives. These would be my long-term backups.
And then I would make sure I had two or three more sets of flash drives as backups for the backups.
They are so small, and so robust (much tougher than CDs & DVDs, and even hard drives), this seems like a good idea. Each set of backups would be stored in a fire-proof, water-proof, bomb-proof and burglar-proof container in different locations, so that if something happened to one set of backups, the others would still be available.
Then it would be necessary to update these backups every couple of years.
But it would really take the worry out of trying to store hundreds of DVDs and CDS, which aren't really all that reliable unless they are stored very carefully.
