USB drives, for those who do not yet know, are those small thumb-sized devices that many students have begun carrying on their key-chains lately. They commonly come in various capacities that range from 16MB to 1GB, and they’re small enough to comfortably fit in your pocket. The most common size for retail thumb drives is 256MB, roughly the joint capacity of 178 floppy disks. The convenience is unbeatable: Stick it into the USB drive and drag some files onto it. Take it out and you’re good to go.

Thumb drives are particularly useful when sharing files between groups of people, specifically when working together on a project of some sort. There are no wasted CD’s to trash afterward and no need to fuss with transferring files (especially if they happen to be large files) over a network. Instead, just pass around a thumb drive and you can quickly and easily gather many files together from many different sources.

There are many alternatives to owning a thumb drive. Free e-mail inboxes seem to be growing exponentially these days, and e-mailing files as attachment is usually a feasible option. For example, Hotmail and Yahoo! are now offering 250MB. However, for those cases when you don’t want to bother or don’t have access to the Internet, thumb drives currently seem to be the best option available for relatively small-size file transfers.

If you are interested in buying one, there are a few things you should watch out for before you hand over your cash. Although it seems obvious, first of all, make sure the one you buy is slender enough such that it will fit between two other USB devices. Some, such as Lexar’s JumpDrive, are too thick to fit properly. The capacity of the drive should suit your needs, as well. To approximate your need you can take into consideration that a 256MB drive can hold somewhere near 80 average-sized MP3’s.