Introduction

My first computer was a Commodore 64 and it came with a hard drive with less than 20MB of storage - somewhere around that mark if my memory serves correctly. Back in the day, that was plenty of space and the hard drive was never filled to capacity. Most of the applications were only "bytes" large and 20MB was plenty for most people.

Now days, 20MB is nothing - you could fill that previously trusty Commodore hard drive with just a few high resolution images and in a matter of seconds.

Enter the 21st century and we have desktop hard drives which not only spin and operate much quicker but come in sizes up to 750GB and even 1TB by the end of the year (according to our sources) - that's over 50,000 times the size, in a relatively short time frame. Given those numbers and if technology continues to move at the same pace, in year 2025 or so we could expect to see 50,000TB hard drives.

For years now, USB pen drives have become common place all around the world. They started off offering storage capacities of around 8MB and then gradually increased in size, even to a massive 16GB drive, which was recently released from Transcend. USB pen drives, thumb drives, pocket drives or whatever you like to call them are extremely handy and very reliable since they use solid state components - this is extremely important since it's data on the go. Some are even water-proof now incase one happens to slip out of your pocket into a puddle or if you decide to go for a swim but somehow forget to remove the pen drive from your pocket.

Today we are looking at a bunch of different pen drives from a range of different companies. Sizes range from 512MB to 4GB and each have their own special feature and style. With Christmas only about two months away, a pen drive would make a great gift for someone in your family or a friend and even the high-end brand name drives with all the cool features and good performance won't cost you a fortunate.

Let's have a look and find out a couple of things - which offers the most attractive looks and features and which offers the best performance, at the right price.