USB drives let you carry information from place to place with ease. USB drives are also called flash drives, because they instantly bring up any of your information on any available computer. Some people call them thumb drives, because of their unique shape. Whatever you call them, these little marvels can hold an amazing amount of data and still fit in a pocket, purse or just in the palm of your hand. Plugging them in any available USB drive brings up all of your information on any computer or USB capable device no matter where you are at. Customized USB drives even let you personalize your individual drive or promote your special brand.
How Much Can a USB Really Hold?
USB drives come in a wide variety of sizes. A single 1 GB USB drive can carry up to 2 hours of video, the size of an average movie on it, or lots of other smaller files. A 1 GB flash drive can hold up to 900 pages of document files, or a massive 230 song music library. Putting your music library on your thumb drive frees up space on your computer and lets you carry all of your favorite tunes anywhere you go in less space than a single CD.
1 GBcustomized USB drivesare big enough to carry 614 photos and still offers the flair of an individual outer message. 1 GB is a middle of the road storage capacity for USB drives. You can find flash drives with as little as 64 MB or as much as 16 GB depending on your personal storage needs.
Best of all, you can use your USB drive over and over again. If you want to store your music files on it, you can change the songs whenever you need to, or split the space between documents, pictures and even documents. Files are stored on USB drives the same way they are on your computer. You can create new files for each type of file you want to store, or divide them into categories for easier recognition.
USB drives do not have operating systems on them. They are not dependent on any particular system and work with any computer, so it is easy to retrieve your information no matter what type of computer you find yourself sitting at.
The customization of a USB drive does nothing to change the ability of the flash drive to hold information. Whatever size storage system you choose will still hold the files you need even when it is printed with your logo or design on the outside.
Real Storage Expectations
One thing to consider when choosing a USB drive size is that file sizes can vary depending on the information stored. A 1 GB USB drive will hold the aforementioned 614 pictures of an average, typical size, but some pictures may be larger than others and some smaller, making the actual number vary a little bit. The same is true for songs, video files and documents.
Song files actually have the greatest variance since they vary greatly in length. The iconic song “American Pie” (album length) is over 8 minutes long, which is almost 3 times the length of the average single. Keeping those variants in mind when considering the average number of files each USB can hold will give you a better understanding of how much you can expect from each one. The numbers shown here are meant to reflect an average number you can expect to store on a single drive.
