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.
It was 2012 and 2 or 4 GB, I believe. I was in elementary school, and my school didn’t allow students to bring electronics from home. So when we had the chance to hang out at each other’s homes on weekends, my friends and I used to share pirated video games and movies with one another using flash drives or CDs. That was the only way to enjoy video games and movies at the time, as we didn’t have proper internet access.
I never used floppy disks myself, but I saw my older brother use them when I was a toddler. I wasn’t allowed near computers back then for obvious reasons, unlike the “iPad kids” these days. So technically, I never experienced the transition, lol.
Flash drives were still relatively expensive here, and I had to borrow my brother’s if I needed one. They cost around 1k/GB in our currency, as far as I can remember.