How Does a Pen Drive Work

The pen drive is so named because of its size and shape. They are inserted into the USB port of the desktop computers or laptop computers, and are very compact in size as compared to CDs and DVDs. The capacity of a pen drive varies from 32MB to 128 GB, which is larger than even CDs and DVDs. They can be read as well as written. With the availability of pen drives, the problem of data storage has been solved to a great extent. Many a time, it is also referred to as a USB flash drive.

Construction of Pen Drives

The pen drives use USB 2.0 version and the data rate of the USB 2.0 is almost 480 kbps. Nowadays, USB 2.0 port is available with every desktop computer as well as laptop computers. Pen drives have a USB male connector and a printed circuit board inside it. A processor and memory unit are embedded on the printed circuit board. The computers have the USB female connector, commonly known as USB port of the computer. They are becoming extremely popular due to easy availability of the USB port. It has an EEPROM memory which can be erased within fraction of seconds. As the name suggests, data is transferred serially, i.e. only one bit is transferred at a time. This reduces the complexity of the circuit mounted on the printed circuit board of the pen drives. This feature further reduces their power consumption.

Working

The USB (Universal Serial Bus) pen drives are plug and play devices as they do not require a software to work. Data, audio and video can be easily read and written from a pen drive. They do not require any battery to operate. You just have to plug it into the USB socket of the computer and start accessing the required data from it or writing data on it. The USB port of the computer helps in faster data transfer than the serial port. The operating system detects the USB pen drive immediately and a new drive is automatically created in your computer. You can view the newly created drive on your computer. It is accessed from an icon created in your 'My Computer' section on the computer. You can now transfer data, songs and videos to or from the computer. When the transfer is completed, you should disconnect it from the computer. It has a flash memory and the type of memory is EEPROM (Electrically Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory).

Advantages of Pen Drives

The greatest advantage of a pen drive is its size and portability. Its small size and the amount of data that can be accommodated in it, are not comparable to any other storage device. Moreover, the speed of data transfer to or from the pen drive is very high. They are not affected by dust, water and fungus, which is the case with many floppy disks. Their power consumption is also very less. Almost all the operating systems support and detect pen drives. Also, you can protect the data on your pen drive by making it password protected. Nowadays, mp3 players and digital camera are included in the pen drives. These are available in a wide variety of storage capacities and are available at affordable prices.

Pen drives are being increasingly used as a data storage device due to their versatile features. With the advancing technology, the storage size and the data transfer speed are also increasing day by day.