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CD-ROM drives gone in a flash
IT stocks up on flash drives, helps students prepare for upgrades
By Barbara Hernandez
bhernan5@mscd.edu

Floppy drives are prehistoric. Zip drives are endangered. Soon CD drives may meet a familiar fate.

Over the next three years Metro’s Information Technology department plans to update all student computer labs with a new alternative for storing data: USB flash drives.

“All computers in student labs are on a three-year replacement plan,” said Yvonne Flood, assistant vice president of the department. “The new computers we are purchasing do not have CD drives and DVD drives.”

About 500 lab computers will be replaced according to IT’s schedule. All new computers will only be equipped with USB ports. A computer generally costs $1,000 to $1,300, Flood said.

To help students adjust to these changes, IT intends to give out 500 to 1,000 flash drives during the spring semester.

Funds for the flash drives were appropriated from the fall semester’s IT fee, a mandatory tuition fee charged to students.

The 256-megabyte flash drives cost $8 each and will be purchased in bulk, Flood said. About 50 flash drives per day will be distributed free to students in selected computer labs. The selected labs will require students to use flash drives only. Students who use the labs will benefit most from the flash drives, Flood said. However, IT is keeping silent as to which computer labs will require flash-drive use only.

“It’s for the students,” said George Middlemist, interim vice president of the IT department. “The last thing we want to do is have students to come into a lab and not be able to work.”

A flash drive can generally store from 16 megabytes to 8 gigabytes of information. The price of flash drives varies considerably depending on how much space is needed. Flash drives are considered more durable than floppy and zip disks because they contain no moving parts and keep dust out.

Flash drives are not prone to magnetism, said Julius Reinante, a technical support representative for Rocky Mountain RAM, a computer-memory manufacturer based in Boulder.

“Flash drives are different from the floppies that we used to know,” Reinante said. “The capacity is only limited by the ranges we come up with.”

The president of the Student Government Assembly, Jack Wylie, said he owns eight flash drives. He said limiting CD and DVD drives will ultimately save money.

However, the move may cause problems for some students.

“If you want to use student labs, then you will have to buy a flash drive,” Wylie said.

Some students on campus still prefer to use traditional saving methods. Kseniya Bakhtin, a Spanish major, said she uses floppy disks because it is a habit and using something new takes a while to get use to.

“I have a feeling floppies will die soon,” Bakhtin said.

Some people never use storage devices at all.

“I tell my students not to use flash drives,” said Ryan Stroup, a professor of video game design at Red Rocks and Arapahoe community colleges. “I don’t own them because they are so small. People wash them in their pants and people leave them in computer drives all the time.”

Instead, he said, he e-mails his files to himself.

When working for Apple Computer, Stroup said, employees were given flash drives for storage use.

However, the devices caused problems, the primary setback being loss of data. Later, Apple gave their employees iPods for storage use because people were more careful with them.

In previous years, IT’s desktop replacement program allowed the IT department to purchase outdated computers coming out of student labs and sell them to faculty and staff, Flood said.

However, next year IT intends to create a new program to make sure outdated computers go to department labs, Flood said.

“Three or four years ago, the computers we were getting came with the zip drives. (The) same thing is happening to the CDs,” Middlemist said. “If you go to a shop to get a computer, you don’t get a floppy drive. Technology changes all the time. Certain kinds of drives go away. They’re still an option, but they’re not as prevalent as they used to be.”