<i>USB drives</i> tiny devices, huge capacity
Photo: SK ENAMUL HAQ
The world is getting smaller as distance is diminishing. And electronic gazettes are becoming tinier to store and do more with a shorter space. Think about your favourite video game or a music player. Who knew just three decades back that they could be run all at a time on a fancy portable machine? And there are those lean, mean and tiny devices that, in fact, can keep thousands of books in its silicon storage, which a big shelf cannot. Hardly there could be any better case of how things have got tinier with time since the world started to put all its records on small pieces of microprocessor. "All kinds of portable storages are a big deal in the market these days, whether it is a simple USB dongle or an external hard drive," said Md Arafat Kabir of United Computer Centre. UCC, which is the local authorised dealer for the world-renowned brand Transcend, claims to have a market share of around 45 percent of the portable storage devices sold each month in Bangladesh. Formerly, people had those poor old floppy disks -- the flat four-sided portable storage device that hardly had the memory space for a big music file. But when these USB (Universal Serial Bus) compatible flash memory drives and potable hard drives with bigger capacity and smarter designs started to hit the market a few years back, all other storage tools started to look outdated at once. And now these portable drives are coming with much bigger capacity and the industry experts observed that these devices are getting even varied in their application and size. "The reason why portable storages are becoming popular is that they are capable of instantly transferring and backing up a huge amount of data from your computer at a time," said Foyez Morshed of Computer Source. The company is the local dealer for Apacer, another big name in portable storage devices based in Taiwan. "The latest pen drives in the market can at best have a capacity of 32 gigabytes, while a state of the art portable hard drive can hold up to four terabyte," said Morshed, adding: "Nevertheless, hard drives with the capacity of 320 GB and 500 GB are of the highest demand." "Most customers including students opt for pen drives, but portable hard drives are more popular among the professionals who need to back up a huge amount at a time," he said. Earlier, his company introduced WD My Passport model of Western Digital brand in the local market. The hard drive is capable of providing automatic and continuous back up with its WD SmartWare software. "A 500 GB My Passport with automatic back-up facility may cost Tk 7,500, while the 320 GB version is priced at Tk 6,000," Morshed said, adding: "We were the first one to introduce this type in the local market." The popular pen drives are with 4GB and 8GB capacity. Despite having much less capacity than a hard drive, they are handier and smarter, and so best suited for transferring lesser amount of data. A DATA, Apacer, AH, Silicon Power, Transcend and Twinmos are some of the most common varieties among the pen drives or USB flash drives available in the local market. "Pen drives are by far the most popular devices among all sorts of portable storages. They are handy and coveted among all types of PC users," said Arafat Kabir of United Computer Centre. Among the Transcend brand USB flash drives, there are V series, T series, Hi Speed series and Jet Flash Elite verities, while its portable hard drives include StoreJet 25 D2, 25D3, 25C and StoreJet elite. A typical 4GB pen drives in the market are usually priced at around Tk 650 to Tk 850, and the ones with 8GB capacity have a price tag between Tk 1,000 and Tk 1,500. However, apart from USB flash drives and hard drives, there is also a growing usage of portable storages as memory modules, MP3 players, digital media players and memory cards, while related accessories like card reader, USB hub, data transfer cable and HDMI cable are of growing demand. "Memory cards including microSD and miniSD verities are mostly used for handset devices, while the SD verities are used for photo transfer," said a retailer at BCS Computer City in Dhaka. "DDR3-1333, DDR3-1066 and DDR2-533, on the other hand, are the most popular models of memory module solutions available for notebooks," he added.
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