Is that a gigabyte in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?
In Arthur C. Clarke’s 3001: The Final Odyssey, one of the things everyone has and carries with them is a petabyte chip that conveniently stores all the data they’ll acquire over their lifetimes.
A petabyte is 1,024 terabytes, which is 1,024 gigabytes. So a petabyte is a million gig. Since I have well over a half-terabyte of disk space here at home (700 GB) and still feel a bit cramped, I think Clark should have been thinking along the lines of a multi-exabyte chip (an exabyte is 1,024 petabytes) or whatever the next increment is above exabyte.
In any event, convenient, pocketable data storage isn’t science-fiction. It’s been with us for a couple of years now. There isn’t a standard name for them yet. Take USB add flash, thumb, pen or key; then either drive or disk; and there you have it. USB Flash/Thumb/Pen/Key Disk/Drive
I just call mine the widget.
The widget plugs into the USB port of any Windows, Mac or Linux PC and behaves like an ordinary disk. It just takes the next available drive letter. Here at home it’s the I: drive.
I know a lot of people who have widgets. Most use them for things like taking their favorite MP3s to work, taking large files home to work on. I use mine for two purposes, data backup and must-have programs.
Should my apartment get broken into or burn down, my most important stuff is on the widget. And if a client calls with troubles when I’m away from home and I can’t solve them with a web browser, I keep the FileZilla FTP program, PuTTY terminal software and my editor of choice, NoteTab Pro on it.
Even at the library with all the security on the public PCs, I can plug the widget in and fire up either program, running them directly from the widget. I’ve done it. It works just fine and it’s ever so geeky.
The problem is, that my one-year-old translucent purple USB Key Drive is only 256 MB—about a third of a CD—and I have so much stuff to back up, that it doesn’t fit unless it’s zipped. And even then I have to be selective.
The widget helped me recently to secure a client. I loaded the demo of their web site on it along with the Windows version of Apache web server, and ran their web site from the widget on a laptop. Who needs Wi-Fi? So when thinking of ways to remove the comma from my bank account, a new widget just seemed to offer a certain symmetry.
The new widget arrived UPS Blue today. (And the UPS guy here is even cuter than the one at the old place.) It’s a Sandisk Cruzer Mini 1GB that’s actually smaller and lighter than my old quarter-gig one.
Thus far I have FileZilla, PuTTY, NoteTab Pro, the complete install of XAMPP for Windows (Apache, MySQL, Perl and PHP), all the web sites I’m responsible for, my entire Windows home directory (not just the My Documents folder) and Eudora, my trusty email program, all resident on the new widget without being zipped and there’s still a bit of room to spare.
The old purple one will continue in its role as off-site backup and I may actually work right from the new one. We’ll see what happens after I’m done with this project and have a day or two, and after the novelty wears off.
June 5th, 2004 at 9:55 pm EDT
Amazing how when I got my first computer it had a 100MB hard drive on it and that was ever so cool. Then when I worked at a computer store for awhile, the first 1GB drives came out and they were all the rage. And we all said “what would I ever fill that drive up with?”
June 5th, 2004 at 10:34 pm EDT
DJ:
I go back a bit further than that (10MB), but still I had the same reaction to my first HD. Over the years I’ve learned that there’s no such a thing as enough storage. The question I as myself now is, “I wonder how long it’ll take to fill this?”
The two 160GB drives I purchased in January for backup repositories are both nearly full. I have this terrible habit of backing-up regularly and never deleting old backups. With four PCs and the web server, there’s a lot of stuff to back-up.
As for the Cruzer, it’s forcing me to pare down the amount of stuff I keep “live” in the home directory of my main PC. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it is extra work.