Ask Lemmy

I remember having a Kingston USB drive like this

At Uni. I'd bought a 64MB MP3 USB player which replaced my mini disc player that got stolen. When buying I hadn't realised how useful it would be for transfering uni work. Plus the uni had a fast connection so we could torrent MP3s real quickly (before they finally woke up and properly locked their machines and network down).

This was the fellow!

https://ebay.io/m/xgXpwb

I think around 2003ish.

Y'all don't forget the hot minute where Zip Drives with 100mb disks were almost a big deal.

I still have mine.

It was a 32mb (megabyte) flash drive. that I used to hack my original Xbox, which I also still have.

I don't remember the first time I used one, but the first one I bought was a 1GB PNY Attaché for about $29.99 in 2005, at Best Buy. I used that thing for many, many years, even after the glue holding the plastic failed and the connector receded into the housing. I still have it around here somewhere, it's just a pain having to pull the connector out to use it.

I remember when we called those little USB devices dongles. And before flash drives, there were Zip drives. We've come a long way from floppy disks!

When win95 osr2 came out. First Windows that supported it.

In 2002, I was taking a computer programming class at community college. The teacher recommended a floppy disk since we’re just saving text files, but I got a 64 MB drive and loved it right away.

I had an mp3 player in 2003 that was basically just a usb stick with a minijack, two buttons, and a volume control. When inserted into what was essentially a battery case, it worked as an mp3 player. When inserted into my PC it worked as a USB drive. I loved the simplicity, and in a pinch I could use it for other files too.

128MB, iirc

Back in 2003 or 2004 I had an MP3 player with 64MB of storage and a USB plug on one end (with a cap to cover it up), which technically counts as a USB stick.

I never used that for anything other than music files though.

My first proper USB stick I got in 2005 and it had 128 MB

I'm always carrying around an encrypted drive and at this point it's basically an external SSD with a few TB storage.

Really handy while travelling internationally

I remember paying 20 dollars to a guy at staples who had a 512 MB drive, instead if buying it for 45.

Oh 2003

I don't think I used one until about 2008. Until then they were pretty prohibitively expensive (for me, at least). I used CDs for most of my rather minimal data storage needs.

64MB, bought from a bestbuy store in 2003. I used it for college to print reports instead of the CD-RW method. Only problem was, many computers didn't have the necessary USB drivers so they wouldn't recognize the flashdrive (they were introduced with Windows XP service pack 3 which was not yet common), so you had to first install the drivers from a little mini-disk. But then you were good to go! I had a couple computers on college campus which i had pre-loaded with the drivers, so I world hope that one of them had nobody sitting in front of it... otherwise I'd pick a random computer and load the drivers onto it. I specifically looked for other computer labs that were off the beaten path since it increased the chance of getting the same computer.

Whenever it cost £35 for a 256MB stick. The Internet suggests 2003 or 2004 which tracks.

Maybe around 2003? It was a weird little device that was also an MP3 player. It had a headphone jack, play/pause/next/prev, and that was it. Was like 128mb and played mp3s in order they were written to the device, I think.

I thought it was really cool, but maybe not my best purchase.

I bought my first flash drive on sale for $12, a whopping 512mb. Fuck if I knew what to do with it at the time but I liked that I could carry cool pics and links to my favorite flash games with me. It wasn't long after that I got my second, 2. fucking. gigs. Brought the entirety of Diablo 2 and a few Pokemon ROMs home from my uncle on that bad boy. Used it to put XBMC on an original Xbox. Got into Pirate video thanks to that thing. Still have it to this day, think it still has my d&d 3.5 collection on it.

The one I miss most though, tasteful little orange steel swing design. Wore it at all times as a necklace because it had this minimalist jewelry vibe. I had a live Ubuntu boot and ftp client on it, filled the whole drive, but I could boot into that instead of most computers and remote home to access my computer. Blew a lot of minds in highschool with that. Accidentally left it plugged into a computer on the last day before graduation and never got a chance to go back for it. I'd kill for 128gb or higher with that same external design, but you can't find them from reputable places these days.

It was 2012 and 2 or 4 GB, I believe. I was in elementary school, and my school didn't allow students to bring electronics from home. So when we had the chance to hang out at each other's homes on weekends, my friends and I used to share pirated video games and movies with one another using flash drives or CDs. That was the only way to enjoy video games and movies at the time, as we didn't have proper internet access.

​I never used floppy disks myself, but I saw my older brother use them when I was a toddler. I wasn't allowed near computers back then for obvious reasons, unlike the "iPad kids" these days. So technically, I never experienced the transition, lol.

​Flash drives were still relatively expensive here, and I had to borrow my brother's if I needed one. They cost around 1k/GB in our currency, as far as I can remember.

I am too young to remember. The flash drives were always there. Probably somewhere in primary school for some assignment.

CD only had -RW, it was DVD that had -RW and +RW variants.

Lately I've just been using Samba.

My dad worked at a semi-conductor plant when I was growing up, and regularly went to SemiCon and he'd give my siblings and I all the rando swag from booths he got. Mostly pens or keychains, but every once in a while there would be some cool tech toy like a laser pointer, an electronic business card (reprogramable for your personal stuff), and toward the end before they closed the plant, low capacity thumbdrives. Had to have been around 2000 or 2001 when I first used one. They were hella new at the time.

I remember it was 8MB.

I had zip disks with more storage so I hated using it since even at the time it was small, but, needed to get files to/from school and 8MB compared to a floppy was crazy huge!

2002

I had a 32 MB one I bought for about $35.

I also had a 32 MB MP3 player. That was considered adequate, but not "a lot" at the time.

I think it was 16MB or 32MB.

I had put a 3.5" floppy drive in the machine that I used it on, as well as years of successor computers, plus CD-Rs, so I had alternatives for sneakernet for years.

I've had it in my desk for decades and occasionally use it. It's pretty slow and small, but for many files, that's fine. Never had any shennanigans from it.

I think that the move to USB-C is going to finally kill it, though. I've got a 128GB USB-C drive that I carry with me now.

I worked my way through college at my university computer lab (97-01). We went ALL IN on zip drives, so that's what I used as my high capacity (lol) storage for longer than I should have (through maybe 2004-ish when the last drive died). Still have a bunch of disks around here somewhere. So...soon after that was my switch to thumb drives.

My first flash drive was $40 for 32 MB. I got at Fry's around 2001. I still have it and show it youngn's for a laugh. I tell them it's the only one I've never lost because it's the right size - about half the size of a flat pack of gum.

My dad would go to tech things and one time he excitedly brought a handful of them back. I thiiink they were 2gb? He gave me one and I remember basically being like idk why I would ever need this. A year later I was in college and boy did that little guy come in handy. Especially after I had a failing hard drive that refused to boot into windows so I used the USB to boot Ubuntu and recover my data.

To install Linux on a computer in my basement.

Edit: Oops, that was the last time.

I think it was 1987, but we called them floppy discs at the time.

I had one of these
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbtSLaxP1sc

Every time I flash Linux or a BIOS update onto a new computer. I can't think of another use case other than OS installs. Most file transfers are easier through the cloud and if it's really large where that would be slow/expensive/inconvenient then you're usually using a hard drive or ssd.

I didn’t use them much until I moved out. Up until then, I burned CD’s if I really needed something portable. PortableApps changed my workflow. I could plug that into a computer at the computer lab at college, and have my custom portable FireFox (pretty new at the time still) as well as OpenOffice, MediaMonkey and some others. I don’t recall how much I paid for the drive, but I think it was 256MB? This was around 2005.

Flash drives I have no idea, but I remember when we ditched those fuckin Mouse Cables for "high speed" USB 2.0 in the early 2000s and it felt really good.