xavel

For a long time, floppy disks where the best way to cheaply share data with other people on a hardware basis. It was good for plenty reasons: floppy disks don't cost much, they're reusable, are arguably good at keeping their data (as long as you keep them away from anything magnetic), and had a reasonably long life expectancy, at least considering the materials they're made of.

Nowadays, the best thing that would come close to floppy disks are SD cards and usb sticks. And even though both sd cards and usbsticks are becoming cheaper every day, they're still nowhere near as cheap as floppy disks. And I can't think of anyone who would be hoarding hundreds of USB sticks, just to give them away never to be seen again. Additionally, and more obviously, floppy disks can no longer keep up with modern technology: they don't allow to store much information at all (roughly 2MB is less than peanuts nowadays. Most of my PDF documents are twice the size), and hardly anyone I know of even has a floppy disk drive anymore.

Of course I know about CDroms -- but the thing about CDs is, they require a CDburner, and the process requires a while. Certainly not as much as it used to, but this factor persists. Also, unless you use CDRW, the data is permanently stored onto it, and if you no longer need it, it just becomes a pice of worthless, non-resuable plastic.

So what alternatives are there, alternatives that don't involve cloud sharing? What hardware-based mediums do we have that allows sharing data in a cheap, disposable way, that doesn't require me to store data on the internet?

What is there to expect in the future?