Where will USB Flash Drives be in Next Couple of Years?
USB flash drives have come a long way from their inception a little over a decade ago. They first started off as nothing more than an expensive way to store small files that by today’s standards would be the equivalent of trying to move your family cross country on a bicycle. It’s not very efficient nor can it carry a lot of things, but you could eventually get to your destination.
Flash forward a couple years and with the inception of USB 2.0, things started to work in the USBs favor. Data capacities grew, speeds increased, and prices plummeted to levels where even the average consumer could use and benefit from everything USB had to offer. Recently with the release of USB 3.0, we are about to enter into an era of ever increasing transfer speeds, bigger than ever before data capacities, and even cheaper cost per gigabyte of data than ever before.
With all of these technological advances just in the last few years, it makes us all wonder exactly where flash drives will be in the future. Will they continue to grow exponentially in performance while maintaining low costs, or will a new technology take over and the USB will go to the wayside as the cassette tape?
Well there is no surefire way to know for sure, but there is good indication that USBs are here to stay. It was recently announced that Japans Elpida Memory Inc and Sharp Corp have started working on a new type of flash memory called ReRAM that could make modern flash memory completely and utterly obsolete.
The new ReRAM according to both companies could be available as soon as 2013 and could boast speeds up to 10,000 times faster than current NAND flash memory! This would mean that accessing files from your cell phone, solid state hard drive, USB flash drive, etc. may not even take any time to load; it would just access it instantaneously!
Speeds like this would also mean that transferring files between devices would take mere seconds. You could move a Blu-ray movie from your PC hard drive to a USB drive in seconds. It would literally take longer to transfer the USB drive between devices than it would be to transfer the files!
It is just too bad we all have to wait about 3 years before getting our hands on such a wonderful piece of technology, but we here at Premium USB will be patiently waiting for this ReRAM and can’t wait to offer it to our customers if it gets through its development.
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