Portable Storage

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Portable Storage certainly has come a long way in recent days. It wasn’t that long ago that all computers came with a built-in “floppy drive”, either a 3.5” in more recent days or a 5 ¼” for us old-timers. Younger computer users have probably never even seen a 5 ¼” floppy drive, much less have ever used one. Now a new computer probably won’t have any floppy drive at all, instead using much better technology offering literally hundreds or even thousands of times the storage in less space.

This morning I popped out a 256 MB “memory stick” from my digital camera, popped into my card reader on my notebook PC and copied dozens of family photos on to my PC in seconds. In the “old days” it would take over 200 floppy disks and hours of frustration to accomplish moving the same amount of data.

In my pocket, on my key ring, I carry a “thumb drive”, an amazing USB device that has 2 Gigs of storage; more capacity than well over 10000 1.44 Meg floppy disks. To carry that amount of data around on floppy disks would require a wheelbarrow or a small pickup truck full of them. To purchase those disks would require an outlay of over $500.00 at bargain prices. The USB thumb drive costs about $45.

In between the floppy and memory cards and “thumb drives” we had several innovations for portable storage that offered hundreds of megabytes or even a gigabyte of storage. Technology such as “zip drives” and “jazz drives” are 2 examples, but those were expensive and relatively slow compared to a USB thumb drive.

All this cheap and portable storage opens up new concerns for corporate networks. For instance, does your business have controls on USB devices? What stops an employee or other visitor from copying your sensitive data to their portable thumb drive? Also, it is awfully tempting for a person to immediately hook up a thumb drive to a PC. There are already several documented security breaches caused by planted thumb drives in employee break rooms with viruses or Trojan programs installed. The employee “finds” the thumb drive, hooks it up, and installs the malware on the corporate PC, behind the company firewall! This can cause a serious security problem. In other instances, employees or non-authorized persons have been known to copy sensitive data onto their thumb without being noticed.