Digital Home Thoughts: Tom's Hardware Checks Out USB 3.0 Flash Drives

"Imagine if you were in a real-life role similar to Daniel Zavitz in the film Enemy of the State. You’re locked in your apartment when you realize you have to transfer a huge video file quickly before leaving. Bad guys will be busting your door down any second. If your options were based on modern USB 3.0 solutions, which drive would you grab?"

Flash drives were a great idea. When they first arrived, USB ports were already becoming common place and storage needs for transporting files were exceeding what the ancient Floppy drive could support. There were some alternatives, the most common being CD-Rs and CD-RWs, however, the process in using them was complex and annoying. I believe that flash drives really took off when USB 2.0 was widely adopted. Using older USB 1.1 ports, transferring files was still agonizingly slow. With USB 2.0, files moved at a cheerful rate. With larger files though, this no longer seems to be the case. USB 3.0 seems to be the solution, but have you seen the size of some of those drives? USB flash drives are handy because they are portable, and by "portable," I mean "fit-on-your-keychain-and-not-have-to-worry-about-it-stuffing-your-pocket" portable. Some of these look like they pack hard drives in them. I guess it will be a few more months, maybe years, before we see everyone using USB 3.0 flash drives, unless some of you out there need that extra speed more than pocket space.