Once upon a time, 1GB of flash memory was serious capacity—and it wasn’t cheap. In early 2002, JMTek’s USBDrive boasted up to 1GB, a notable feat at the time. Today, that same capacity is tiny by consumer standards, with most Kingston Data Traveler models starting at 64GB and reaching 512GB.

Storage costs have plummeted dramatically, falling from over $8,000 per gigabyte in the early years to just 94 cents per gigabyte by 2013. The real breakthrough came from denser NAND: Toshiba and SanDisk’s 8Gb chip in 2005 stored 1GB on a single die, and later advances like 3D NAND and TLC allowed manufacturers to pack far more data without enlarging the drive.

Making a tiny drive doesn’t save much money because the USB connector, controller, circuit board, casing, and packaging remain the same. Once high‑density NAND becomes cheap at scale, cutting capacity hardly reduces the finished product’s cost. Moreover, tools like Windows’ installation‑media utility require at least 8GB, rendering a 1GB stick impractical for everyday use.

Small drives haven’t vanished entirely; they persist in industrial and embedded niches where compatibility, endurance, or fixed hardware matter more than capacity. Companies such as Delkin and Apacer still offer industrial USB drives starting at 1GB and 256MB, respectively.