I have a pile of various size USB sticks from very old 64MB to 1GB sticks all the way to 64GB in size. The small ones I still use for playing MP3's in my car but otherwise are pointless in such small capacity. The last USB stick I got was a 3-pack of 16GB sticks on sale for $15.00 so it worked out to $5 for 16GB or $15 for total combined capacity of 48GB.
I almost bought into the blu-ray drives to store larger amount of data in same physical area as what a DVD disc would use in my home, but in all actuality for the money an external hard drive can contain far more storage capacity on the cheap, so that 3TB seagate external for $129.99 makes more sense. The price of the drive and its discs kept me away from upgrading to blu-ray. Maybe if they marketed the blu-ray like they did the inkjet printers it would have been more successful to make drives cheaper to get and make up for the cost in a monopolized disc market where the more you burn with it the more they make similar to how the printers were the more you print with it the more ink used. The 25GB capacity per blu-ray disc was tempting but the price tag never came down to what I wanted when it was the next best thing. These days the price tag came down but the need for optical storage like that is gone for myself. Burning to DVD-R or +R disc's with 4.7GB capacity is most of the time plenty of space, and DVD drives are common so the media especially if DVD-R vs +R will work in just about any drive out there vs if I switched to blu-ray then i would need to either get an external blu-ray or install those drives into systems that need to be able to share discs.
It will be interesting if optical storage actually goes the path of holographic data storage for home computer use. Its available now if your rich, but its still far cheaper to just have an external hard drive with far more capacity as for the ones I have seen are less than 1TB and price tag of like $15,000 for the drive and $150 for each media that holds the data.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_data_storageThanks everyone for your input on this; and I was able to go the USB route to install from that and get VS 2015 Community edition installed using a 16GB USB stick that I already owned. I could have tried to squeeze it onto an 8GB stick which shows 7.2GB capacity but I had the 16GB kicking around so used that instead.
