1999 vs. 2009 Then And Now – Portable Media

In a few short months it’s going to be 2009, and a ton of stuff has changed in the world of computing over the past almost-ten years. Some of the modern advancements have proven to be a notable improvement while others still produce the same crapola they did nearly ten years ago.

In this installment we’ll be taking a look at portable media.

Portable media

Everyone knows what a hard disk drive is, abbreviated HDD. However this is what’s termed as a “fixed disk”, i.e. one that stays within the computer that is not designed to be moved from place to place.

In the portable media arena there are four types that most people remember:

3.5-inch Floppy Diskette

Always unreliable but dirt cheap. Useful for not much more than holding documents, smaller spreadsheets and not much else.

Interestingly enough, most floppy disks have lifetime warranties on them. Technically speaking, you could take all your floppies that can’t read or write anymore, mail ‘em off to whoever manufactured them (3M, Sony, etc.) and see if they’ll honor the replacements. Yes, this would prove to waste postage costs but it would be an interesting experiment.

Zip Drives/Zip disks

Rated one of the worst 25 tech products ever made by PC World, this line of products was absolutely horrible from day one. It was even less reliable than the already-unreliable floppy disk, except you paid triple the cost Remember the “GigaPack”? Ten Zip disks for “only” $100? Yep, a lot of people poured mountains of cash into this only for the infamous click..click..click.. noise which spelled out nothing but doom. The drive didn’t work, your data was lost and well.. that’s all there was to it.

Oddly enough, the Jaz drive – which was older than Zip but made by the same company – was actually pretty good. It used tape and it was slow – but it worked great and it held 1GB of data which for the mid-to-late 1990s was unbelievably huge for portable storage. In 1998 they had 2GB versions of it. That model lasted until it was discontinued in 2002.

Why did Jaz work so much better? Because the internal structure was made to work a hard disk drive and not a floppy disk drive.

Compact Discs

In 1999 CD-R discs were not cheap and cost about $1.00 per disc. But these days you can get them as cheap as 20¢ per disc or less depending on where you shop.

There are actually several variants of CD-R discs:

• 74-minute/650 MiB
• 79-minute and 59-second/702MiB (marketed as “80-minute” when actually not)
• 90-minute/790 MiB
• 99-minute/870 MiB

The ones you use most often are the 74-minute and “80-minute” type.

Small side note: It’s not worth it to seek out the 90-minute or 99-minute versions being that if you want more space you can just grab recordable DVD media on the cheap.

CD-R discs at best are somewhat reliable. Granted, they kick the pants off of floppies and Zip disks in speed and ease of use but something as insignificant as a fingerprint can made a CD-R unreadable and “skip”.

In addition, CD-R discs are not manufactured as good as they used to be. Years ago you never saw a CD-R that was see-thru almost like smoked glass, but now being that there are so many of them around it’s all too easy to come across bad discs even if brand new.

CD-R, even now, is a dinosaur. It’s based on a technology from 1977 (no joke) and I’m very surprised it hasn’t gone the way of the dodo yet.

USB “stick”, “pen drive”, “key”

You’ll first notice that nobody exactly knows what to call a small portable USB-based storage device.

I call it “stick” because it looks, well.. like a stick.

Others call it “pen drive”. I can’t understand that one because it bears no resemblance to a pen unless you buy one that specifically looks like a pen. In addition, a USB stick isn’t a “drive” necessarily, so there’s another point of confusion right there because it has no moving parts.

And still others call it a USB “key”, yet it doesn’t look like a key nor does it function like one. It is true that many have a small loop so you can easily attach it to a key ring and maybe that’s where the name originates from(?) Who knows.

Regardless, at present the USB stick is almost as cheap as floppy disks were back in their heyday. The only thing I haven’t seen (unless someone points it out to me) are “packs” of USB sticks. Right now I only see them for sale in singles, but if someone were to offer say, a pack of 10 256MB or 512MB sticks for 10 bucks, yeah – I’d buy that. It would be great to have “disposable” sticks like that I could give to friends and not worry about getting it back.

The USB stick is by far the best physical portable writeable media you can buy – no question.

Things that USB sticks can do that its predecessors could not:

• Survive an accidental run thru the washing machine.
• Be written to thousands and thousands of times without complaint.
• Light up.
• Can be stepped on, stomped on, thrown against a wall, dropped, scratched or whatever else and still work.
• Can be used to run a full GUI-based operating system.

USB sticks are just plain great.

Watch for the next installment of Then and Now coming soon.