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I still have a zip drive. If I ever get another comp upgrade, I'm thinking of switching to something more convenient like a USB drive.

Anyway, what are the pros and cons of all the major removable stuff?

I think the world has basically moved over to flash devices for the home user.

USB flashdrives and DVD/CD rewritables are pretty common nowadays when it comes to file storage. Certainly most people have the proper equipment that can read them at least, while on the case of Zip/Rev such popularity doesn't exist, so they're pretty much best used for backups and the like.

For documents and such the best removable currently is something usb based, flash or a hd enclosure depending on your space needs since they are literaly plug and play and can be considered just another drive by the system . I've seen several goverment offices I know people in go to a usb-stick per person for their documents and while my innergeek is pained that they didn't do some sort of networked infrastructure the more I think about it and see it in practice the more I'm liking the system and it's simplicity for newb users. With proper backups it works really well.

More towards your point, right now, except in very specialised enviroments (ie. not at home), there isn't a point really to anything but usb/firewire(disks only) based flash stick (smaller physicly, has a limit on the number of writes it can take, however its pretty high so you shouldnt worry about it unless you use it for something like a cache or similar I/O heavy stuff) or hdd (enclosure or even a off-the-shelf external disk which is basicly a hdd enclosure but shaped around the disk itself which means its smaller physicly but they usualy have smaller capacities then what is available on "standard" disks). For giving someone data or backup for home currently dvds are the best for compatibility reasons (plus dvd burners are really cheap right now).

Basicly, the time when there was a point to the zip-drive and such (here I'm including all the 100meg-or-so floppys) is in the past, flash memory and external usb drives rule the personal movable storage front.

P.S. One thing I just remembered, if you have a digital camera you can simply get a small external (usb) card reader that supports the flash memory format that your camera uses. Presto! Instant usb stick for cheap (15$ or so) with increaseable capacity (with winxp anyway, dunno how well supported they are on older systems since, frankly, I've never tried it on them).

Get a nice flash based Mp3 player or a microdriver version. You get all the benfits of a MP3 player which is designed to tote around plus you get 512 MB's to 60 GB of storage space.

mmar wrote:usb/firewire(disks only) based flash stick (smaller physicly, has a limit on the number of writes it can take, however its pretty high so you shouldnt worry about it unless you use it for something like a cache or similar I/O heavy stuff)

About how many is this limit of writes?

The claim is 100,000 write cycles actually, for most NAND anyways. I use an ipod with video 60gb for my removable storage needs, btw.

Go old school, use a cassette drive .

punch cards

I have a external DVD+-RW/RAM drive I got off Newegg for 85$... (RAMs have write cycles up to a million, RWs much less, however RWs are more compatible (and less reliable, unless you use a filesystem w/ defect management like UDF1.5, unsupported on Windows w/o special software))

Uraniun235 wrote:punch cards

emmerson platters.

oh wait punchcards, platters, and reel tape drives.

Uraniun235 wrote:punch cards

That's nothing. I write all my data by hand onto sheets of white paper. Sure the I/O speed is slow and it's heavy to carry around, but at least I know that wherever I go my data is totally accessible.

Jew wrote:

Uraniun235 wrote:punch cards

That's nothing. I write all my data by hand onto sheets of white paper. Sure the I/O speed is slow and it's heavy to carry around, but at least I know that wherever I go my data is totally accessible.

You had paper?
Granite slab and bronze chisel here. Which was only good for a few slabs before I had to get a new one.