The other day a friend of mine was mentioning that they needed to go to the store and buy a flash drive, but when they were there earlier in the week they were overwhelmed by the vast differences in style and capacity flash drives come in nowadays. (Click here if you don't know what a flash drive is.) While style is completely personal, there are a few tips that can make picking a capacity (or more commonly called "size") of flash drive easier.
The first thing to consider is what you'll be putting on the drive. Are you using it to backup photos? Transferring songs between your computers? Or are you storing important documents and PDFs on it? Different files tend to be larger or smaller than others. For example, a good average size for a word document (1-3 pages of text) is about 20-30 KB (kilobytes). Audio (music, spoken word, etc) is about 1 MB (megabyte) per minute, and photos can vary wildly depending on resolution and file type but tend to be 1 MB or less per photo. (If you don't understand "megabyte" or "kilobyte" check back on Thursday when I'll be covering that topic.)
That being said, a 4 GB flash drive will hold roughly 4,000 photos, 4,000 minutes of audio, or more word documents than any one person would probably ever have for personal use at any one time. When stated like that, most people usually lean more towards getting a smaller (again, we're talking about capacity, not physical size) flash drive. Consider though if you're storing a home video. If you have a nice HD camera, it can take up to- or sometimes surpass- 2 GB (gigabytes) per hour of video. This is because videos contain both an audio track and thousands of pictures to make up the video.
Practical Tip of the Day:
If you're planning on using a flash drive to back up your files, I recommend reconsidering and getting an external hard drive instead. Far too often I've seen clients that have a drawer filled with flash drives that have photos on them, but because of this method, they have to search through the drawer looking for the correct drive if they need it and that's if they had the forethought to label the drives as they filled them. An external hard drive gives you one place to find all of them, making it much easier to locate your files if you need to recover them.
Well, a flash drive operates much like an external hard drive, and both are vital and beneficial in saving data. However, the advantage of a flash drive over an external hard drive is the convenience of portability. You can just put it in your pocket, and take it out if you need it. And nowadays, lots of flash drives come in the shape of accessories like bracelets or necklaces, which makes it even more portable.
ReplyDelete@Nannie Salyards