Flash drives nudging floppies, CDs to brink of extinction
Urip Hudiono, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
After an hour of web browsing and checking e-mails at an Internet kiosk, Jaya ends up with some 10 megabytes (MB) of downloaded files on his terminal -- all of which he needs to copy to his computer back home.
But instead of grabbing a pile of floppy disks to do the job, the 27-year-old graduate pulls out a small gadget the weight -- and half the size -- of a pen from his pocket.
He then sticks the thumb-sized device into the terminal's Universal Serial Bus (USB) port and waits less than a minute for it to blink away and guzzle all of the data onto its memory chip.
"I still use floppies, but rarely, and only for saving small files," he said. "USB flash drives are what I mostly use these days for transferring the bulk of my data."
In a more extreme case on the use of the latest star in removable storage devices, marketing staffer Santi relates how she converted to the cult of USB flash drives after her laptop's hard disk crashed just when she was about to give a presentation to some clients.
"Fortunately, I remembered that I had saved my files in one of those (flash) drives and simply transferred the files to another laptop," she said.
Santi, who now always keeps a backup of her files in a 256MB USB flash drive, is even thinking of abandoning her laptop altogether as many projectors now have USB ports and the underlying software to recognize common presentation files.
"That way, I can just stick the drives into the projector's port and do all my presentation from there," she said.
Like Jaya and Santi, many people have indeed turned to USB flash drives for storing and moving their data, moving away from floppy disks and rewritable compact discs (CDs).
Look around, and you're likely to notice flash drives hanging from employee lanyards instead of office ID cards, and compete with cellular phones in filling the pockets of most people today.
Data from research firm Gartner shows that worldwide sales of USB flash drives continue to be strong, reaching 51.7 million units in sales last year -- up from 21 million in 2003 -- and carving a market worth at least US$1 billion.
"For 2005, I estimate some 83.6 million of the drives will be shipped, and further increasing to some 160 million USB drives in 2010," Gartner's senior semiconductor memory analyst Joseph Unsworth told The Jakarta Post via e-mail.
Unsworth explained that the recent prevalence of USB flash drives was mainly because of their practicality and ease-of-use.
"The drives provide consumers with a compact means of storage, on the most common interface available today -- the USB port," he said. "Most operating systems also support them through an easy user experience, without the need of additional software drivers."
USB flash drives can be used with Apple MacOS, GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows, all of which provide users with a simple "drag-and-drop" method to read and write data to the drives.
With such advantages, Unsworth said USB flash drives would certainly nudge floppy disks ever closer to the brink of extinction and make rewritable CDs and digital versatile discs (DVD) a hassle to use in comparison.
"The floppy disk drive is functionally obsolete," he said. "Given its storage capacity of only 1.44MB, it has limited opportunity in an increasingly data-rich environment."
Rewritable CDs and DVDs, meanwhile, although having advantages in terms of price and a minimum 650 MB of capacity, carry an inconvenience in their physical size and the need for related drives and software to record and read the discs.
Floppies and CDs are also more prone to data loss from physical abuse, while several USB flash drive vendors are already offering titanium-sealed products that can withstand even the harshest hammering and rubber-encased ones that can be dropped into a glass of water with no resulting defect.
Concerning the still relatively high price of USB flash drives, Unsworth said their prices were being driven down at the component level, specifically in the price of their memory chips, while their capacities continued to rise.
"Prices for USB drives will continue to decline for the foreseeable future enabling new applications and functions given higher levels of storage," he said.
Following the 128MB drives commonly used last year, USB flash drives with a size of 256MB priced at some US$30 are becoming the norm today. One can even make their neighbors envious with an overkill drive with memory capacities of 512MB for some $50 and 1 gigabyte (GB) for less than $100.
Unsworth further said that he saw the market for USB flash drives becoming bi-modal, with "dumb drives" and "smart drives".
"The dumb drives are going to be very cheap and offer limited functionality as a simple storage option," he said, adding that more of such drives would also be used as promotional event giveaways.
The smart USB drive segment, meanwhile, holds enormous potential by providing consumers additional functionality via software and hardware enhancements.
"Security features such as encryption and thumb-print recognition, back-up and bootable functions, as well as personalized application software are all already available and being refined," he said. "And vendors will be quick to embrace these new functions for their products because margins are getting very thin due to intense competition."
Among the vendors, Unsworth said, are market leaders SanDisk and M-Systems, which recently striked up the U3 standard -- an underlying software platform providing such additional functions for the next generation of USB flash drives.
Meanwhile, other USB flash drive vendors have indeed started to offer products with other functions besides data storage, such as voice recording, MP3 audio playback and FM tuning. Open source software developer Mozilla has also released a specific version of its popular Firefox browser that can run on USB flash drives.