The Capacity of Flash Drives
The past decade has seen massive increases in the storage capacity of USB flash drives, often called thumb drives. Not only can they store a great deal of data, but they're also small and highly portable. Because they lack moving parts, flash drives are more reliable than earlier storage media like floppy disks.
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Early Flash Drives
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The first USB flash drives were put on the market in 2000. They had a storage capacity of 8 megabytes. By 2003, flash drives had become widely available, and their capacity had jumped to 128 megabytes. From there, capacity quickly increased to 256 megabytes, then to 512 megabytes, then to 1 gigabyte.
Current Flash Drives
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Flash drives commonly sold today have storage capacities which range between 4 gigabytes and 64 gigabytes. The largest storage capacity currently available in a commercially produced flash drive is 256 gigabytes.
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Future of Flash Drives
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Over the next several years, flash memory technology will likely be overtaken by nanotechnology, which can create thumb drives capable of storing a terabyte of data. According to Michael Kozicki, director of Arizona State University's Center for Applied Nanoionics, there would potentially be no limit to storage capacity with the new technology.
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References
- Photo Credit usb flash drive image by Bosko Martinovic from Fotolia.com
