"The report doesn't say why thumb drive sales are likely to dip"
Maybe everyone's got one? OK, perhaps several, rather than one, but they last for ages and work just fine so there's no need to buy a new one every six months.
Peak thumb drive is upon us: by 2016 sales of the ubiquitous storage medium will start to decline. So says the the Santa Clara Group's USB tracker for 2013's fourth quarter, which says last year saw humanity produce 273 million thumb drives. The average capacity of drives shipped in 2013's final quarter was 25 gigabytes, so …
I'd have thought it's more likely that the mobile phone and cloud solutions have replaced thumb drives for the average user. Techies may need them for a while to install operating systems but most of the techies I know have long since stopped using them for actual data transfer unless a customer is playing the no laptop on the network game. Even then, customers without wifi are becoming increasingly rare so it's often only for files over 10MB or so where email becomes more difficult than finding the USB key at the bottom of the bag :)
To my mind, what drives sales is the ever-increasing capacity of the things gives the consumer an incentive to keep upgrading. I remember a time when there was a whole tenner difference between 128MB and 256MB so I settled for the smaller device (which I still have, incidentally, as an emergency last resort). Last year I walked into a newly opened branch of Staples and they were dishing out 8GB drives, two per customer, at £2 each.
Since they don't actually do anything with the data themselves there comes a point for each user where they really don't need one any bigger, so will tail off buying any more. It may come at a different point for everyone, but sooner or later you'll get bored with trying to find more things to put on it.
Maybe the future is everything is so small they just merge with external backup SSDs, and the development effort turns to long-life retention guarantees. Perhaps someone could start researching a form-factor that looks neat on a shelf...
is people looking at their 'data' collection and realising they can never afford enough tissues with balm or even just the time to watch the videos they've collected.
I had friends 20 years ago who had so much vinyl that more time was spent looking for the next thing to play than actually playing it. The thing about jackdaws is they generally lack the ability to either sort their data usably - or write regular expressions to find it when they need it.
My 11 year old daughter rarely uses her camera for just that reason - the 8 year old is still doing 10Gb a week.
> is people looking at their 'data' collection and realising they can never afford enough tissues with balm or even just the time to watch the videos they've collected.
That equates to terabytes of data and we aren't quite there yet either in terms of thumb drives or micro SD cards. Video (or even photos) is big and it doesn't take that much stuff to fill up the smaller devices.
Ah ye, another technology for which usage peaks long after it has become obsolete
Obsolete you say? I like Cloudy things as much as the next guy. But I for One don't see MicroSD HC/XC Cards as being the same thing as a USB2.0 Thumbdrive. Which are more or less free as Beer these days. So implying obsolescence would suggest something is set to replace it. Considering the uses I have for "Thumbdrives" and or other such MicroSD HC/XC Cards to pump Phablet Memory, are NOT always in line with each other. I would love to know what some of you lot think will be replacing these things?
Begs question why they can sell these Chips so cheaply in a USB Shell, and yet demand so much more when you lob on a few more of these things in parallel on a 2.5"/3.5" form factor.
"Begs question why they can sell these Chips so cheaply in a USB Shell, and yet demand so much more when you lob on a few more of these things in parallel on a 2.5"/3.5" form factor."
Probably because the chips in sticks are cheap slow devices while in SSDs they are pricier fast high duty cycle devices, also because they can charge more, got to make some profit somewhere.
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"Memory stick" is a much better and more descriptive name.
It's also the name of a Sony-proprietary card format.
I don't know if anyone still uses them, but some years back, there was a risk that if you bought a "memory stick", you *might* get a USB drive, or you *might* get a Sony-specific Memory Stick card that you couldn't use...
Vic.
I travel to places where wifi or indeed any connection is patchy or not available. I have my music on a 64gb stick and my essential papers on a smaller one, and I am happy as a clam. And I can't be the only one a little unhappy about cloudifying all my precious digital belongings.
Indeed, I end up on planes a lot where they want $15 to connect to the (terrible) WiFi. I have gotten in the habit of carrying three drives, a 256 GB USB 2.0 device for my entertainment, a 16 GB self-encrypting device for documents and a 32 GB USB 3.0 device for a portable OS environment.
I feel mean for saying so but the full worth of the report is seen in the choice of averaging technique for determining the popular size of thumb drives.
Even I know what you need is the one where you take the actual sizes and group them, then count the ones in each group and report the group with the most in it, and I'm terrible at sums. Adding up all the storage and dividing by units sold is as useful as a ham sandwich at a Jewish wedding.
Even the person of median intelligence should be able to spot that 25 gig is a nonsensical size for thumb drives - at least, not fly-by-night counterfeit thumb drives.
... where 5 meg broadband is the stuff of rumour and legend, these drives still provide a valuable way to move data between machines rather than just download everything each time.
But it is a worry that NTFS' file system may soon be overwhelmed by a giant volume set, created from all of the millions of USB drives plugged into it. :-D
“Vendors continued to promote features for differentiation and value-add, especially in areas such as security and backup"
In other words, "Vendors feel the need to distract buyers from the fact that their products are an interchangeable commodity, and thereby shovel on useless bloatware that everyone deletes first thing."
It seems like they're undercounting emerging markets, if they're predicting the peak to happen so soon. I'm sure sales will fall (if they aren't already) in developed countries - but largely because everyone (or at least every household) has several already, and the capacities have long since gotten high enough that nobody needs to buy new ones. And they're less necessary now, with the rise of mobile devices and cloud services.
But they seem to be imagining that rest of the world has ubiquitous broadband and home networking too. As more and more people in underdeveloped countries start using computers, it is inevitable that they'll need to move files between computers before they have good broadband.