Small and Mighty

This is an ode to the USB flash drive.  They’ve been around for awhile but it seems (though they are popular) not as many people have latched on to them as I would have expected.  In my opinion anyone with a computer should also own a USB flash drive.

For those unsure of exactly what a USB flash drive is good for, in short, they are good for storage.  You basically plug the thing into the USB port on your computer and, as if you inserted a blank disk, you can then drag files onto the drive.

Storage is important because computers, despite their increased reliability over time, still crash.  The smartest thing you can do is back up your files by saving them not only on your computers hard drive but in another place as well.  Besides the USB there are also the options of an external hard drive or a disk.

I find that I would rather save my blank CD’s and DVD’s for music and class projects (that I must often hand in on a disk) and an external hard drive is just not in my personal price range at the moment (though depending on storage capacity flash drives and hard drives can have similar costs).  Beyond that a USB drive is just much more travel friendly for my convenience, an external hard drive is much more difficult to drag back and forth from school.

USB’s come in a number of sizes over a very broad price range, from a few hundred megabytes to a lot of gigabytes.  Depending on how much information you feel you need to backup (or how much cash you have handy) that determines how much storage space you are going to purchase.  I find it is only necessary to backup my work, writing files and the like, so I have yet to reach out of the two gigabyte range.

It’s a simple relatively well priced solution to the possibility of a computer induced mental break down.  Even with the newest and most reliable computer on your desk often it’s better to be safe than sorry.