I was meeting with a friend recently and transferring some files onto their laptop when I realised I’ve been using USB Drives to do that for the last year. In fact I haven’t needed to burn any files to DVD ever since I got several USB Drives with 8Gb or more capacity.
Basically cheap 8GB and larger USB Drives (costing $15+ at time of writing) have made data transfers via burnt 4.7GB DVD’s obsolete.
Many people own laptops or netbooks these days so if you need to give them some files at a meeting it’s much faster and easier to copy the files onto a fast USB drive than it was in the old days of finding a blank DVD and waiting while your computer burnt the files to it.
On the more rare occasions when larger files need to be transferred eg: many videos or photographs, a portable USB hard drive is the best solution, far easier than burning dozens of DVD’s.
Do you Agree or Disagree? Have cheap 8GB and bigger USB Drives made data transfers using burnt DVD’s obsolete?
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Personally I tend to choose everything that means less clutter, so recently I too have opted for usb drives. I only use dvds for things that I want to keep forever such as family photos and videos, but when it comes to data that will be erased in a few days, portable drives are the best. I’m getting kinda minimalistic
DVD is still useful for archiving data. Though my preference these days is to copy on to large USB hard drives instead.
I’m still using an OLD usb drive from when they first came out! I only need it on occassion but the newer computers actually have trouble with it. If I could just remember to buy a new one when at the store.