TooMuchGreen

I know I rattle on about the advantages of using the cloud for application delivery and yes, I do believe it’s the future of computing as we know it (once the interweb catches up with our needs that is) however for complete integration as a storage repository for our larger bits and bobs of data cloud dumping is presently just too slow and too expensive.

Docs from Google, or a Business Management suite from JING are all presently well and good, of that there’s no doubt, and both are already sat waiting for *us* to catch up however at an average of $12 per 1GB per year you’d need a pretty good reason to shell out for a decent sized off-site pot for your dynamic personal data, especially with upload speeds averaging around 500k (that’s half a megabyte in real money), it  would take forever to upload that 2.3GB Adobe CS3 .DMG file let alone work with it dynamically, so, what gives? You need backup, you want to get as much data as possible off that stupidly pointless 16GB Netbook SSD but don’t fancy lugging around a USB hard drive, even if it is only a 2.5 inch jobbie, what’s the option? Is there one? Well yes, you just need to think a bit laterally, not look ‘too’ technically far ahead and maybe revisit an old favourite who’s been with us for a few years now steadily growing in the background, I’m taking about that little fella the USB key….!

Yes, the little fella is actually no longer such a *little fella*, he’s been in the gym pumping iron. Check out the crazy 64GB Jet Flash drive from Transcend (as pictured above), cool huh, not only for it’s mental storage capacity but don’t you think it would look at home in any Sci-Fi movie? (I’ve just watched Wall-E – LOL). They’re cheap too, under £100 ($150), not bad, equivalent cloud storage would set you back £520 ($768) and you’d have to renew it every year.

I’ve been using a 16GB USB key for 6 months now and am continually amazed at just how much use it gets. It just hangs off my keyring and goes everywhere I go, I literally use it daily (you never know when you’re going to need some data storage on the beach). Seriously though it IS incredibly (and surprisingly) useful. I’ve just been to Florida for example and forgot to take my Freecom USB Hard drive to transfer some (*cough*) ‘important’ files from my mate Andy, not a problem – USB key to the rescue..! It’s so small it’s always with me and always ready, you just don’t have to think about it, I love it and having a whopping 64GB instead would be even more awesome. We’re back in the UK in 10 weeks and I’ll most definitely be ordering (they’ll be even cheaper then too, bonus).