I remember that awkward period after we outgrew floppies but before USB flash storage became mainstream when CD-RW and CD+RW (Yes there was a difference and it mattered!) being peddled as the next portable storage format. My first USB stick was 128 megabytes and cost around $60. I actually still have it, but it may no longer work. I believe I bought it in around 2003 or 2004. I remember them steadily decreasing in price, or at least price per unit storage, very quickly over the ensuing years, to the point where they were giving away multi-gig sticks by around 2009 or 2010.
I bought my first flash drive on sale for $12, a whopping 512mb. Fuck if I knew what to do with it at the time but I liked that I could carry cool pics and links to my favorite flash games with me. It wasn’t long after that I got my second, 2. fucking. gigs. Brought the entirety of Diablo 2 and a few Pokemon ROMs home from my uncle on that bad boy. Used it to put XBMC on an original Xbox. Got into Pirate video thanks to that thing. Still have it to this day, think it still has my d&d 3.5 collection on it.
The one I miss most though, tasteful little orange steel swing design. Wore it at all times as a necklace because it had this minimalist jewelry vibe. I had a live Ubuntu boot and ftp client on it, filled the whole drive, but I could boot into that instead of most computers and remote home to access my computer. Blew a lot of minds in highschool with that. Accidentally left it plugged into a computer on the last day before graduation and never got a chance to go back for it. I’d kill for 128gb or higher with that same external design, but you can’t find them from reputable places these days.