In the decade or so since portable jump drives became a necessity for working with computers, the storage capacity that these drives boast has increased by leaps and bounds. Whereas basic models once only held 128 or 256 MB of data on them, customers can now easily find a 100 GB flash drive or an even bigger one for well under $50. As the capacity of these drives has grown, the cost that you pay for them has fallen accordingly, and now you can find jump drives capable of backing up an entire hard disk that hardly cost anything at all.
Of course, some will say that the rise of cloud storage and cellular data has outmoded the jump drive, but in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. If you have made the switch from physical to cloud storage, you may have forgotten how quickly data transfers via a direct USB connection. For example, if you are trying to fill a 100 GB flash drive all the way to full capacity, it will only take about 30 minutes via a USB 2.0 port. The same transfer over an ethernet connection could take most of a day, and via Wifi it would likely take several days.
That is why the 100 GB flash drive is more important than ever. File sizes have ballooned along with storage capacity, and it’s very common that people need to transfer huge files from one machine to another. Trying to handle that process via the internet or a network is extremely time consuming. While cloud storage and online transfers have their place, when it comes to transfer speed, they simply aren’t any replacement for directly connected physical media. If you are often in a position where you need to port large files, do yourself a favor and get a 100 GB flash drive at a low cost and enjoy all the extra time you will have on your hands.