Portable storage started from the days of 5 ¼ inch floppy drives of 360kb capacity in the late 70s and early 80s. The portable data carrier has evolved into the latest avatar of a pen drive capable of holding 16 GB of data. From 300kb to 16 GB and still increasing; the growth of the portable data transfer device from a magnetic disk to a flash chip based drive has been phenomenal.

USB pen drives have derived their name from the small pen like shape and being capable of being carried in the pocket just like a pen; hence the name pen drive. The pen drive in its latest avatar is all rage now a days and every computer user owns one of some capacity or the other. Pen drives have practically made floppy drives, zip drives absolutely obsolete. Some of the manufacturers have stopped including a floppy drive in their systems. Pen drives come in all shapes and sized and has been tagged as the ‘next big thing’ in the exploding pen drive market. Pen drives are being built into every conceivable USB pen drives have derived their name from the small pen like shape and being capable of being carried in the pocket just like a pen; hence the name pen drive. The pen drive in its latest avatar is all rage now a days and every computer user owns one of some capacity or the other. Pen drives have practically made floppy drives, zip drives absolutely obsolete. Some of the manufacturers have stopped including a floppy drive in their systems. Pen drives come in all shapes and sized and has been tagged as the ‘next big thing’ in the exploding pen drive market. Pen drives are being built into every conceivable item of use including lockets.

Pen drives have evolved over the years. It started with a mere 16Mb drive size and not capacities have reached 64 GB and the advancement in technology will soon put a Terabyte pen drive in our hands soon. More and more features are being added to the normal pen drive to make it a more attractive buy for the user giving him value for money. As pen drives are capable of storing any kind of data especially audio files, manufacturers have started building MP3 players directly on the pen drive with rechargeable batteries which get charged when connected to the USB port of the computers. This has sounded the death knell for the portable audio cassette players just like the floppies.