Removable, portable, and rewritable, all around multi functional, USB Flash Drives which came into widespread use in late 1990s and 2000 have proved to be one of the most useful and versatile products in the modern world. Their power and capabilities have also grown with time.

Their increasing capability has allowed them to be used for variety of purposes; personal data storage and transport, backup, assist system administration and security, execute applications without installing into computer, software demonstration and marketing, boot device, increase system memory, are some of the uses that comes to mind. Their versatility is ever expanding. For instance, some of them now have sound output capability so can act as music players.

First flash drives had only 64MB of memory. Now on the other hand USB flash drives are touching 32GB. This will only increase as more of the recent breakthroughs in technology are incorporated into memory chip production.

These days flash drives are capable of sustaining 1 million plus rewrites and can retain their data for over ten years. In addition, you can obtain USB memory card readers that allow the memory to be removed from the drive separately, thus allowing even more flexibility of purpose.

Others portable storage methods such as floppy disks, or rewritable CD-ROMs, suffer greatly in comparison to flash drives. Unlike USB flash drives they are large, slow, have less storage capacity, have limited rewriting capacity, or have moving parts (so are unreliable). In most cases, they suffer from all these faults at once.

In fact, word “drive” is misleading since USB flash drives do not have any moving parts. The word was used because they appear as such in operating system interface.

Flash memory chip is placed on a circuit board that is encased in plastic, rubber or metal covering. This makes it very sturdy. This also allows for customization of the appearance of USB flash drives; it can look like a key tag, a pen or many other things.

Data is accessed by computer or other gadgets like MP3 players through the USB port. USB port also supplies the power required.

There are no signs that the growth in Digital Home Networking will slow down anytime soon. It is likely that more attention will be directed to this market in the coming years as home networks become increasingly common.

Home Media servers sit at the center for the home network. As such, Home Media Server market is driven by the digital home networking market. Data from all the main server makers in Taiwan and South Korea, who manufacture the servers for such companies as HP, IBM, Dell, and Sun Microsystems, indicate that the market growing fast. Similarly several companies have sprung up in mainland China to serve the same market.

Industry experts have predicted that demand for basic media servers will grow by over 60% by 2010, while demand for advanced media servers is expected to grow by close to 60% by then.

Such media servers have to be seamlessly interoperable with a variety of other devices that comes into contact with home network. In addition given ever evolving nature of digital media formats, they have to support software that can handle variety of such formats. Content providers have also demanded that some content protection mechanisms against piracy be built into these servers. Enhanced security against unauthorized use and break-ins is also paramount. Another feature that may have demand is the ability to create backups and carry out maintenance through remote login, so that the servers can be maintained by remote service providers.

A manufacturers’ alliance called Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) sets the general guidelines for future direction of the home media servers.

Some of the new Home Media Players, Home Theatre Systems, and other such devices, do have some server capability built into them. However this is not expected to retard the demand for dedicated Home Media Servers on the long run.

To conclude, all the signs indicate that we can expect lot of market driven innovation and increasing ease of use in Digital Home Networking.

Yes, you heard me right. A breakthrough in technology is likely to increase the storage capacity of electronic devices like MP3 players by a factor of almost hundred and fifty thousand. As I always say more the better!

Currently a state of the art player will hold about forty thousand songs. To make another comparison today’s best 3.5 inch hard drives can hold about one terabyte of data. But if promise of this discovery holds true, 500 terabyte disks are on the horizon.

Key discovery is a switch the size of a molecule or fraction of a nanometer. This allows the stored data to be retrieved ands stored without increasing the size of the gadget using the storage. Switch consists of two banks of molecules placed 0.32 of a nanometer apart from each other on a carbon or gold plane. This in theory allows for 1 billion transistors to be placed on a single microchip.

Discovery published in respected scientific journal Nature Nanotechnology was made by Lee Cronin and Malcolm Kadodwala, chemistry professors at Glasgow University in UK, assisted by researchers at Daresbury Laboratory, Warrington, UK, which houses Synchrotron, a huge radiation source.

Utility of this breakthrough will of course extend well beyond their possible use in music players to all electronic devices. Everyone will get more power and storage.

This is also radical in that it there is no need for fragile silicon, the staple semi conducting material in all modern chips. It may be possible for these switches to be planted on plastic, since they work with carbon, thus allowing greater flexibility to the whole field.