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Bye, Bye Floppy Drive
File Storage with USB Keys
Meaghan Baron
Congratulations! You've finally gotten to the end of that nightmare term paper. It's getting pretty late, though. You had better save your paper and wake up a few minutes early to do the final edits. You save your paper to your floppy drive and go to bed with the elation that only comes with finishing a paper you procrastinated about for so long.
The next morning you boot up the computer, insert your floppy disk and try to open your document, but it isn't there. You know you saved it, you know where you saved it, but all 5,000 words on whatever-it-was are gone.
If only you had double-checked that the document had saved. If only you had printed it last night.
If only you had not used a floppy disk.
Floppy disks, despite their many limitations, have traditionally been the most common portable data devices. As far as data storage goes, the floppy disk is probably your least reliable option. In addition to being disadvantageously shaped and unreliably constructed, floppy disks are extremely prone to failure. Even when you have saved a document exactly the way it should be saved, the disk can become "corrupt" (meaning that one or more files on it have been erased or damaged). At this point, special software is required to retrieve the corrupt files, and even then a document is rarely retrieved in its original or complete form.
But, luckily, there is now a reasonable alternative to the floppy disk that offers reliability, portability and a level of convenience that the floppy cannot match. A USB key is a thumb-sized stick that can be plugged directly into any open USB port. USB keys do not carry the same failure risks as more primitive data storage methods, so when you save a document to your USB key, you can be confident that it will be there when you go looking for it.
When you want to take your USB key to another computer, it can be attached to your key chain, slipped into a credit card-sized case and placed in a wallet, or even just carried in a pocket. USB keys are also called "pen drives" or "flash drives", and they are available in sizes ranging from 16 megabytes (about the space of eight floppy disks) to over 1 gigabyte.
USB keys can be purchased from HoyaComputing's Dell, Apple, and CDW-G online stores, from other online computer stores, and in retail stories such as Best Buy, Staples, or even the Leavey Center bookstore. They can be priced as low as $20 and, under normal circumstances, will never need to be replaced. Dell and many other manufacturers have even gone so far as to offer USB keys instead of floppy drives with their standard computer packages, and it is likely that in the next few years we will see the floppy drive phased out entirely in favor of USB keys.
So rest soundly. With USB technology, your magnum opus will be there in the morning.
Meaghan Baron is a student technogy consultant with UIS. |
