From 1GB Luxury to 64GB Standard: The Vanishing Pen Drive
There was a time when a USB flash drive or pen drive with a capacity of 1 gigabyte (GB) was considered a highly luxurious item. When the first 1GB flash drives entered the market in early 2002, both their price and importance were exceptionally high. However, the situation has changed completely over the past two decades.
Today, pen drives from brands such as Kingston generally start with a minimum capacity of 64GB and go up to 512GB or even higher. As a result of technological advancement, small-capacity memory drives have gradually lost their commercial relevance.
The major factor behind the dramatic increase in flash drive capacity has been the development of ‘NAND’ technology inside memory chips. Over time, researchers have reduced the size of cells inside NAND chips and, through three-dimensional or ‘3D NAND’ technology, have learned to stack cells on top of one another. This has created opportunities to store many times more data without increasing the physical size of pen drives.
When Toshiba and SanDisk unveiled the first 8-gigabit NAND chip in 2005, a new era of storing twice as much data at lower costs began. Subsequently, the development of 3D and TLC NAND technologies led to a rapid decline in storage prices.
The Economics of Not Making Small Drives
Manufacturing a 1GB pen drive has not become technically impossible; rather, selling one has become commercially unprofitable. Producing a pen drive requires not only a memory chip but also a USB connector, circuit board, plastic or metal casing, controller and packaging. Even if the capacity of a 64GB pen drive is reduced to 1GB, the costs of auxiliary components, transportation and marketing remain almost the same.
As a result, there is little difference in the final production cost of 1GB and 64GB pen drives. Moreover, modern computer operating systems or Windows installations themselves require at least 8GB of storage, making small-capacity drives impractical for everyday use.
Special Uses in the Industrial Sector
Manufacturers are gradually reducing the supply of older-generation NAND chips. In 2026, global MLC NAND chip production is forecast to decline by approximately 41.7 percent.
However, although they have become obsolete for general consumers, small-capacity flash drives of 256MB or 1GB are still used in various specialized types of industrial equipment. In such cases, consistent reliability of the equipment and compatibility with specialized software are more important than having enormous storage capacity.
//DBTech/BMT/OR//
