Carrying your important documents is not such a big feat anymore. Within the last 2 years, mobile storage solutions have increasing became popular and moving documents from one place to another has become so much easier.
I can remember just a few years ago that I needed to copy all the documents from the school computer home, and had to carry around quite a few diskettes since it was the only affordable way of moving things. Although it wasn't much, it was about 8 MB of information, carrying around those disks and wondering if the information is good is the main concern. I'm pretty sure that many people out there didn't trust their floppy diskettes 100% since it was mechanical and the slightest thing could cause data to be corrupted. There were portable CD-RW but it would depend if the computer had extra USB ports but not only that it was quite a costly solution.
Nowadays, with not only the emergence of digital camera, portable media solutions have become the new standard of mobile storage solutions. Gone are the days of worrying about if your data has correctly copied to the numerous amounts of diskettes. The new storage mediums can handle huge file sizes without a hitch, and there are numerous varieties of media out there.
External Harddrives
External harddrives are a great solution for those who need to carry around with tons of information, not everyone needs the capacity of a harddrive but it depends on what you need for the task at hand. External HDs is a great way of moving massive amounts of data from one place to another; they use regular harddrives and connect to a computer via USBx or Firewire.
With HD prices going for less than a $1/gig, this mobile storage solution is the cheapest way of moving information from one place to another. Harddrives are secure and last a long time, but not all computers might support USB2 or Firewire so there is that slight drawback of slow speeds. Harddrives are not as fast as memory media but then again there are no memory cards that go beyond 2 gigabytes.
External CD-RW
One of the older mobile storage solution along with the Zip Drive, is the external CD-RW. These have been on the market for quite a few years even before external HDs were out. External CD-RWs are based in the same manner as the internal ones. The only thing that is a problem with the fast external CD-RW is that you need a fast output connection, just like the external HD. There are 48x CD-RW available out there but if your computer only supports USB 1, the maximum output you can probably achieve is around a 4-6x burn, much slower than what you could achieve with USB 2.
Zip Drives
Iomega's Zip Drives have been a really old way, with the external CD-RW, to move information around from one computer to another. The problem with this method is that not all computers do have a Zip Drive installed internally. Albeit there were external drives, they were expensive and slow; but still better than carrying around tons of diskettes.
Looking at their current solutions, they offer portable drives for USB 2 and Firewire, which considerably speeds up data transfer between the device and the data being sent to the disk. With all the advancements in smaller and faster solutions, mentioned below, it makes Zip Drives look and seem outdated. Another downside to these Zip Drives is not only the size of the media, (currently the biggest disk can store 750 MB), but the price. Currently Iomega's offering is a 750 MB disk for $14 USD, which is considerably more expensive and don't forget you will also have to bring your drive with you incase of problems when going to another computer. The 750 MB drive isn't backwards compatible with their previous 100 MB and 250 MB drives so if you own one of these 750 MB drives, chances are you'll need to keep it with you.
Looking at carrying around a few CDs and an external burner is considerably much cheaper since blank CDs are pennies compared to the more expensive Zip Disks, and CDroms are nowadays in every single computer that is built, unlike Zip Drives.
USB Pendrives
USB pendrives or thumbdrives as some people call it is a memory storage solution that is based on using memory, meaning there are no moving parts and transferring of files depends on which USB standard the computer has, and also which one the drive supports as well. I currently have a 64 MB Apacer USB 2 thumbdrive that is quite fast, although I only have USB 1 ports. This drive is quite neat and can transfer any documents I want to and from computers quite fast.
Penddrives come in a variety of sizes from 32MB up to 512 MB, and are detected by Windows as a removable HD. You can work on the document on the thumbdrive without copying it to the computer you are working at. You can put any type of file on these drives such as audio, video and what not. This is a great and small way of keeping documents handy with you wherever you go. There is a new pendrive coming out on the market that claims to be able to take your email anywhere, save your user settings and more by Migo. (We are waiting on a review sample to be mailed to us and will post a review ASAP).
Memory Card Media
With digital camera out there, memory cards have become quite popular. There are a variety of types of digital memory cards such as Compact Flash, Secure Digital (SD) Card and many more. With all that in mind, these cards serve different purposes, one is for your digital cameras and these can also store documents as well.
There are different makers of these memory cards, not all of them are the same speed, price, etc. but they can be used to store documents. These cards are getting lower in price and their capacities are growing substantially. The only problem with using these types of media is that you'll need a memory card reader. You can buy specific card readers, let's say it reads only CF cards, or you can spend a bit more and get 7-in-1 that will cover all the current formats out on the market. Not all of these cards are the same speed, and the different media could cost much more than another type so choose carefully and read their specifications of what it can be used for.
Conclusion
The mobile storage market is becoming the most important market today as far as moving information from one computer to another with very little hassle. Given that this technology is fairly new, with time, memory capacity can double or triple and the size of the device can shrink considerably.
The days of carrying diskettes are done and are a thing of the past since nowadays major computer makers do not include the archaic floppy drives since they are considered useless. There are very little in the way of files being less than the size of a diskette and to span a file over multiple diskettes can be somewhat risky since the chance of corruption is very high. Choosing any memory media storage solution is the fastest possible way of storing and transferring documents since there are no moving parts, and is somewhat the [FONT="Times]de facto[/FONT] storage method of choice. External HDs are still useful for those who do actually need to carry several gigabytes of information from place to place and is faster than burning CD-r, and also finding the programfile is so much simpler on a harddrive than on multiple CDs.