Here is my entry for the STEMgeeks My Favorite Gadget Contest. As I write, there is still time for you to join, too! Just follow the rules for word count and image attribution. What gadget us your favorite? Join in!

My Favorite Gadget: USB Thumb Drive

Pictured below is my very first USB thumb drive. 256MB cost around $30 USD when I bought it about 15 years ago, if memory serves. (pun intended)

Larger drives holding as much as a whole gigabyte were on the market at the time, too, but they were prohibitively expensive for a student budget.

USB 2.0 was fairly new back then, and some computers at my college still only had USB 1.0 ports. iOmega Zip Disks were the digital storage medium of choice. While 256MB is laughably small now, these were the days of Windows XP, and those Zip Disks were only 100MB each. They were cheaper individually, but costs add up, and they could fail catastrophically.

This little gadget was a godsend. It was more compact, more reliable, faster, and a glimpse of things to come as flash memory would basically replace all other forms of rewritable media. Floppies were on the way out, CD-RW was still a thing, and, of course, there were those Zip drives, plus all sorts of other ideas, but this had the feel of the future even then.

This specific drive once held CAD files from my drafting course, my first resumes that got me my first drafting job, some early MP3 rips, demotivational pictures and other early memes, and who knows what all else. At the time, it seemed almost infinite in it storage capacity.

Continuing on a theme. Remember these? Image credit

Now I have flash drives and memory cards that hold 256GB instead of mere MB. This is a thousandfold increase in 15 years, and these new drives still only cost around $30. Higher capacities are, of course, also available.

So why this?

The storage density and energy efficiency of these engineering marvels is too easy to overlook now thatbthey are ubiquitous. I can hardly wait to see what is still to come as solid-state hard drives are refined further, and new technologies we can hardly imagine are waiting in the wings as corporate and university laboratories continue to experiment. But for now, this old thing still works. It isn't obsolete yet. And that is even a marvel in this day and age.

USB drives replaced stacks of older media formats. They helped make paperless workplaces possible. They improved data security as people used them for backup. They allowed us to eventually create bootable devices for Linux experimentation. Flash memory transformed digital cameras and home video. Now Nintendo is using flash memory cards instead of disks for the Switch. This gadget helped built much of modern tech, and the optical drive is going the way of the floppy thanks to the one-two punch of the internet and flash memory.

And for me, this all started with that old worn-out Memorex drive.