Peak thumb drive is coming in 2016

We're headed for exabytes a month but after that it's thumbs down for thumb drives

Peak thumb drive is upon us: by 2016 sales of the ubiquitous storage medium will start to decline.

So says the the Santa Clara Group's USB tracker for 2013's fourth quarter, which says last year saw humanity produce 273 million thumb drives. The average capacity of drives shipped in 2013's final quarter was 25 gigabytes, so the 68 million drives shipped and brought around 1.6 exabytes of storage capacity into the world.

By 2016, the analyst outfit says, we'll be making 300 million or so of the things, but in subsequent years numbers will fall away. If 2013's average capacity increase holds steady, by then the average conference giveaway could be touching 60GB, for an annual thumb drive total of perhaps 16.75 exabytes.

Which is rather a lot.

The analyst say most drives are sold without accoutrements. “Vendors continued to promote features for differentiation and value-add, especially in areas such as security and backup, it says, but “... these applications remained niche markets.”

The report doesn't say why thumb drive sales are likely to dip, but with PC sales slowing, thumb drives being rather resilient and mobile devices preferring SD cards and smaller variants it's not hard to see that thumb drives are less attractive than was once the case. ®