USB Drive 2004 vs 2014

[NeophobiA 1,503]

Photograph by PNG1 on reddit

 

 

What a difference 10 years make! In this great ‘then and now’ comparison, we see a USB flash drive from 2004 vs a USB flash drive from 2014. For the non-techies, the USB drive on the bottom is 64 mb while the USB drive on the top has a 64 gb capacity. Today there are even smaller drives than the one showed in the picture above with even greater capacity, but this particular drive works well for comparison as they are similar in shape and design.

1 Gigabyte = 1024 Megabytes

So the USB drive on top has 1024 times the capacity of the drive on the bottom.

This increase works quite elegantly with Moore’s law which is:

The observation that, over the history of computing hardware, the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years. The law is named after Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore, who described the trend in his 1965 paper. His prediction has proven to be accurate, in part because the law is now used in the semiconductor industry to guide long-term planning and to set targets for research and development.
 
The capabilities of many digital electronic devices are strongly linked to Moore’s law: processing speed, memory capacity, sensors and even the number and size of pixels in digital cameras. All of these are improving at roughly exponential rates as well. This exponential improvement has dramatically enhanced the impact of digital electronics in nearly every segment of the world economy. Moore’s law describes a driving force of technological and social change in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
 
The period is often quoted as 18 months because of Intel executive David House, who predicted that chip performance would double every 18 months (being a combination of the effect of more transistors and their being faster). Although this trend has continued for more than half a century, Moore’s law should be considered an observation or conjecture and not a physical or natural law.