Are thumbdrives going floppy?

Much as I like the design of the Verbatim Store ‘n’ Go Clip-it USB Drive, I’m not going to buy one. In the past I would have snapped one of these up. I almost did a post last month when I saw the device had won the Red Dot ‘Best of the Best’ 2010 award saying we should all rush out and buy one. But I didn’t. I sat back and realised that I used a thumbdrive about once per month these days (at best). In fact the only thing I have really used one for at all of late is installing Windows 7 on one of my laptops as I have a 4GB Kingston thumbdrive setup as bootable for the install which takes <30 mins. Apart from that, I just don’t use ‘em.

Why? You know answer I suspect….the cloud. With services like our own Live Mesh or DropBox I just can’t be bothered fishing out a drive. I’m more likely to post to my 5gb of cloud storage with Mesh to move my files around my own machine. If I’m sharing with others, I use SkyDrive’s 25gb of free storage.

Beyond that, I have a 1TB backup device on my desk and the combination of these meets all of my needs.

So as much as I love the design of the Store ‘n’ Go, I fear this and other thumbdrives are going the way of the floppy disk…in to extinction.

Comments

• Anonymous
  September 29, 2010
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  September 29, 2010
  I got your point but now that mesh is being replaced by Sync with only 2Gb available, maybe it's time to reconsider. Without saying a lot of people can't install sync or mesh or even dropbox at the office and have to find an alternative. Remember the time when we all just send emails to ourselves? ;)

• Anonymous
  September 30, 2010
  @ Vincent - You don't need to install the dropbox client, You can access it via your browser. Not as nice as the client but still gets the job done....

• Anonymous
  October 02, 2010
  aah yes but the difference between memory sticks and floppys of courses is that the former don't need a dedicated device to read them, so as long as there are USB ports there's likely to be a market for memory sticks.  They're still relatively common as replacements for paper packs at events and I don't see anything filling that gap in the next couple of years. QR codes don't seem to be mateuring as rapidly as some

• Anonymous
  October 02, 2010
  Its a good point. Memory sticks though are useful for transferring data that you feel is secure or to a pc/laptop that isnt online.