Older Storage Options: Stay Away

Who remembers the Zip drive or the Jazz drive? They were all the rage in the late '90s, as users quickly filled their hard drives and were looknig for alternative ways to expand their abilities to store large files. But like many high-tech innovations, those tools are useless today -- too small and too slow.

As long as computers have existed, there is the tape drive -- the first ones were paper and later magnetic tape. Tape drives are still used as back-ups, but usually these days it's only for larger, mission-critical applications. There aren't many consumers backing up to tape anymore.

CD-ROMS, floppy disks and other forms of rewritable media have also been longtime favorites for expanding storage capacity. Today, though, CD-ROMs are being replaced by bigger hard drives and tiny USB flash drives.

When it comes down to it, there are very few reasons to continue using older forms of data storage. These methods had their time and place, but today are considered inefficient, insecure and often just too difficult to use.

For $25 you can invest in a USB flash drive. For $100, you can get an external USB hard drive. Go ahead and upgrade. You'll be happy you did it.