Portable storage devices started with the advent of the PC in the year 1980 when IBM first introduced the 5 ¼ inch floppy with a capacity of mere 360kb. This growth in removable storage devices has reached a massive 80GB in a modern pen drive, a capacity which is equivalent to a modern PCs entry level hard disk.

Floppies started from having a capacity of 64 kb which reached its peak at 2.88mb. Then these were surpassed by the zip drives having capacities of 100 MB and 250 MB which also were surpassed by the Compact disk having a capacity of 640 MB which has now reached 800 MB. Then came the multi-layered DVD-RW with capacities ranging from 4.77 GB to 21 GB and then came the Bluray discs which took the storage capacities to 50GB. Further, there was no uniformity in backward compatibility of all these technologies. Pen drives have solved all these problems at oFloppies started from having a capacity of 64 kb which reached its peak at 2.88mb. Then these were surpassed by the zip drives having capacities of 100 MB and 250 MB which also were surpassed by the Compact disk having a capacity of 640 MB which has now reached 800 MB. Then came the multi-layered DVD-RW with capacities ranging from 4.77 GB to 21 GB and then came the Bluray discs which took the storage capacities to 50GB. Further, there was no uniformity in backward compatibility of all these technologies. Pen drives have solved all these problems at one go.

These are all surpassed by the ubiquitous pen drive with capacities ranging from 128 MB to 80 GB and with a variety of additional features to boast about. With a universal connectivity the pen drive can be connected to any PC, Laptop, Macintosh or any computer system which supports USB connectivity. Many printers now have a USB connector for connecting the pen drives directly without the intervention of the mother computer and directly print photos and documents off the pen drives. With 80 GB storage at disposal it is possible for many of the pen drives to store continuous voice recording for over 12 hours. Most of the pen drives come with mp3 playback without the use of any computer for direct playback of songs using earphones with quite impressive results. The pen drives uses flash technology for data storage and had almost unlimited read and write cycles and a pretty long useful life.