32GB Flash Drives are Coming — Should We Really Care?

I decided a coupl’a years back that my hard drives would only be as large as necessary to hold my OS and possibly build my apps (I’m using FreeBSD). I’d save my work on my local storage devices, but I’d be sure to save the important stuff, including work-in-progress, online — e.g., on GMail or Yahoo! Briefcase. I even decided to forego a POP/IMAP mail client but go 100% Webmail — I’ve got this documented here, where I mention that I’ve lost a number of hard drives to a crash and therefore don’t expect my hard drives to last long.

Pardon me therefore for being less than excited about the news of 32GB flash drives (as reported by Art Ilano on the m|ph blog) and their possible use in laptops and possibly PDAs and smartphones. I’m using about 2.5GB of the 16GB I allocated to FreeBSD, and a lot of that is junk from applications I’m not really using a lot, if at all. I’ve also got a few ISOs of GNU/Linux or BSD LiveCDs. As an aside, I have a FreeSBIE install on a 4GB whose /home is almost full so maybe 8GB is about right. I just have to be sure to burn ‘em ISOs shortly after downloading them

The other thing is, there are some sites on the Web that give out free space and applications-on-demand. There’s Writely, which was recently acquired by Google. There’s even a site that hosts your entire OS, called YouOS. Its developers admit that it’s in early alpha though. Also, you obviously do need loads of bandwidth — your 128KBit/second DSL might not cut it, and even if you have 256K or better, your ISPs need a really fat pipe to the rest of the Internet as well. Also, don’t be put off by the idea of accessing your word processor through a Web interface — AJAX (Asynchronous Java and XML) and similar technologies ensure an experience approximating desktop access.

So what do you think I’d rather have, a 32GB flash drive, or a 384K line to the Internet? Sure, there may be a market for those 32GB flash drives, maybe those who have to do graphics manipulation work. But for those of us whose work consists mostly of surfing the Net, reading and writing email, and writing project proposals or presentations — IMHO, we can do our work on a thin client computer, maybe even a smartphone with provisions for a larger display and keyboard.