Goodbye old USB and hello Deals

If any of you have a reasonable memory (no pun intended) you will recall the USB flash drives that appeared at the beginning of the millenium. In terms of capacity, it was a very proud moment for any of us to be walking around the house with a gigabyte on the end of our lanyard.

Yes, they used to come with lanyards.

In a drawer upstairs, still reliably being used for backup of spreadsheet files by the missus, is a sturdy 1GB Kingston DataTraveler Elite, and my memory is a little fuzzy, but I believe I paid close to $100 before tax for it back in 2005.

Above, the original, complete with the supplied quick release lanyard and with a DYI addition of a fishing lure attachment to retain the cap. I recall sourcing the stainless steel spinner swivel from Canadian Tire and in addition, there was a happy purchase of a micro drill set from Princess Auto that has also been used many times over the years.

At the time I referred to my old chestnut story that in 1992 I paid $97 per megabyte for memory on my 386 computer, which I am sure I will continue to use in the future on this blog. The USB stick had a thousand times the capacity, which filled me with wonderment and I just had to have one.

Moore's Law again.

Fast forward to the now and I was looking for a solid state external drive for an Android TV box, which I will discuss soon, and it became apparent that "old" flash drives with USB 2.0 are rapidly being replaced by 3.0 and prices on the old stock have dropped dramatically.

The Android TV box only has USB 2.0 capability, like most computers a year or so old.

Now, the price I am about to say may have been beaten in the week or so since purchase, and this blog will deride large laughs in a decade when terabytes are the norm, but I was in Walmart ten days ago and purchased a clearance 64GB Lexar S70 Jumpdrive at the amazing price of $16.88

I could not resist, I've just gone online to see and they're selling them for $14.98 today...

...no lanyard though.