Flash drives have become the storage media of choice for many people. In short 10 years from taking the first baby steps the USB flash media became world leading technology to transfer data from one place to another, speed has increased by a magnitude and so has the capacity.

A 4GB pen drive is now considered to be too small to carry data, 8GB is not anything interesting in particular either. The 32gb flash usb drive however is still a leading technology that is worth talking about.

In 2000 the flash drive was introduced at a starting 8MB capacity and with that it completely blown floppy disks away. Flash drives were secure and reliable compared to a floppy disk.

We all remember how frustrating it was to depend on one floppy for a really important file, they broke all the time and corrupted files when you least expected. Even in 2000 floppy disks were an inconvenient way of getting data from one computer to another, some files had to be split to 10 floppies to be carried.

Flash drives on the other hand were easy to use. The user had to connect it to an USB port, which all computers had had already. Modern operating systems, like Windows XP, Mac OSX and linux have been able to work with any USB mass storage media right out of the box and it made transferring data easy.

A 1GB pen drive was able to hold more data than a CD and only for about 10 times the price of a rewritable CD you had one that could be rewritten without an extra CD-R drive and did not scratch. 4GB pen drives are able to hold even 4 CDs of data and though they were really spacious at their time, DVD disks pushed them aside.

DVDs were just as cheap as a CD but held 4.5GB data, and after becoming the industry standard for storing high definition videos, the 4GB drives become obsolete as they could not store a whole disk at once. Overcoming this problem manufacturers released the 8GB flash drive, which is the cheapest USB flash drive today that can store a DVD.

But memory chip and flash drive makers did not stop at this milestone, they’ve ventured further to the 16GB and 32GB version. These are completely in reach for the every day customer with their low price and high capacity but we should think for a second before purchasing one.

Most people don’t have too much important data. They have a few hundred photos and documents they need to keep safe, but that is still way under 32GB. People have a very bad habit of storing all their important files at one place, and since 32GB flash drives are so comfortable way of taking data with them they put all their files on it.

This can lead to data loss, literally. If someone loses a 32GB flash drive with all their data it’s a complete devastation. While a broken hard drive can be fixed at least enough to get the data back, a lost pen drive is not only a complete wipe of important information, but a gold mine for anyone with malicious intentions.

A 32GB pen drive is a really cheap and easy way to carry data, but before making this really common and simple to avoid mistake, back up all your data somewhere and never have the only master copy on the flash drive. If there is anything sensitive on your 32gb flash memory drive, encrypt it.

Encryption software are really cheap and easy to use, get familiar with one and start using it.