21st Century Flash (drives)

O.K. Here's a tip for writers. If you don't have a USB flash drive, get one. I apologize if I sound like I'm coming to this discovery a bit late. I'm not--I just didn't realize how badly I needed one until I got it. These little doodads are about the size of the human thumb, hence their alias, "thumb drives." The upshot is that they are very stable storage mediums for those who need something more permanent than a floppy. They are more convenient than a CD-RW, too, since they can be used in almost any computer that has a vacant USB port.
I had been storing all my writing on floppies. My CD burner on my rather elderly home computer is sloooow, and the one thing my spandy new computer at work lacks is, you guessed it, a burner. Oh, well. The trouble with floppies is that they are sometimes very unstable. Write over them a few times and you get a corrupted file. No such problems with flash drives. I stored everything I had on floppy on a 128 MB flash drive, and ALL of it used up only 3 MB of space. And with over 1 million erase/write cycles, I'm good to go for extended writing. Even my home computer with its venerable Windows 98 O/S, happily uses the flash drive with only installing a driver from the included software. I didn't have to restart my computer, and the drive "hot swaps" to my work computer, without restarting or installing software. Pretty nifty.
A flash drive incorporates everything I love about the old floppy disk into a smaller package that stores more data. It's small, portable, easy to use and is much, much more stable than a floppy. Those who use more than one computer, or have a desktop and a notebook, would be well advised to invest in one of these little miracles. They can even be password-protected.
One of the best things? They're cheap. I got a 128 MB drive for about $13 on the Internet. They're more expensive as the storage capacity goes up, but most people will probably be very happy with a 128 or 256 MB drive, for under $30. Considering how much I've almost lost to floppy disks, I think it a wise investment.
Some technology takes a while to grow on me, but I fell in love with my thumb drive immediately. It has to be one of the most useful peripherals I've ever purchased for my computer.