Is the Flash Drive dead?

Before I get into this topic, let me just say up front that I am not a tech blogger, nor do I have any knowledge about Flash Drives, other than my own research and use, and that this post is just my opinion.

A couple of days ago, I was doing some organizing of my computer desk, and I realized that I have 9 of the flash drives that are used to store and transfer files. I have one of them on my keys, and 9 just sitting around collecting dust.

This little pile of drives, ranging in size from 1 gigabyte to 8 gigabyte, got to me to thinking about how often I actually use these drives. And I came to the realization that I have only used the one on my keychain to store some information I was researching last month on someone else’s computer. And once my research was done, the information was placed onto my Skydrive and removed from the flash drive.

When did I use the drive before that bit of research? Almost 2 years ago. November/December 2008.

This made me start to wonder why I hadn’t been using any of these flash drives, and I realized that my school has a system where I can store files I need for school that is accessible from any computer, and I also use my Skydrive account to store files. I don’t need a flash drive.

There are many places on the web, from Skydrive to Google and everything in between, that people can use for free to store files, and those files can be accessed from any computer in the world. So why does anyone spend the money to buy a flash drive?

You can buy a 16 gigabyte flash drive from Amazon for about $28, which comes to $0.5714 per gigabyte. But anyone with a Live.com or Hotmail.com email address gets a 25 gigabyte of storage through Skydrive for free.  Google Docs will give you 1 gigabyte for free, and you can purchase 20 gigabytes for $5 a year. Mediafire offers unlimited storage, unlimited uploads and unlimited downloads for free.

So why would anyone bother to spend money for a flash drive? So I decided to do a list of pros and cons for jump drives and online “cloud” services, such as Skydrive.

USB FLASH DRIVES

Pros

• Files are stored on the drive, rather than directly on your computer
• Flash drives are portable, you can take them anywhere
• Flash drives allow you to easily transfer files between computers

Cons

• Flash drives are easily lost or stolen
• They are easily broken
• Flash drives can easily spread viruses
• They cost money, and sometimes are very expensive (I saw one that was almost $1000!!)
• Flash Drives can stop working

SKYDRIVE (or similar site)

Pros

• Files are stored on a cloud server, rather than directly on your computer
• Files can be accessed from any computer, at any time
• Files can be easily transferred from one computer to another
• Storage is free, or significantly cheaper than a flash drive
• There is a reduced risk of a virus infection from the cloud server
• There is no physical item to be lost, stolen or broken

Cons

• You are limited to single file size for uploads (Skydrive has a 50 megabyte file size limit)
• You may not be able to load more than a few files at a time
• If you don’t have internet, you don’t have access (but how many computers are not connected to the internet today?)

I am sure I have missed many pros and cons that I didn’t or couldn’t think of, but I would say that just from those listed, Skydrive (or some other site) is a much better deal than buying a flash drive.

So, what was the purpose of all of this rambling?

Just to tell you that if you are invested in a company whose major source of income comes from the production and sale of flash drive, you might want to rethink your position, because “cloud” computing is going to eventually make those little pieces of plastic obsolete.