USB Flash Drives

USB (Universal Serial Bus) Flash Drives are small and portable flash memory devices. They plug into a computer’s USB port and function as a portable hard drive.

USB Flash Drives are also called Thumb Drives, Flash Drives, Pen Drives, Jump Drives, Memory Stick and even Key Drives.

The Pen Drives use the USB Mass Storage Standard, which is supported by all the modern operating systems such as Mac OS X, Windows, Linux and Unix.

This Flash drive consists of a small printed circuit board which is encased in plastic or metal. The USB connector protrudes from this plastic or metal protection. Often this has a covering metal cap, or can be retracted into the body of the drive. Thus, there are no moving parts in the USB Drive, which makes it more reliable for use.

Nowadays, most computers do not have a floppy drive. However, they do have a Universal Serial Bus (USB) Port which connects to this device. The Memory Stick is usually plugged into the USB Port of the computer using the USB connector and the data is accessed.

The most common use of the USB Flash Drives is for storage of data. Due to its compact size and structure combined with its large data storage capacity and speed, it is used to store all kinds of data.

Thus, these flash drives are used for the purposes of booting the system, system administration, computer repair, as application carriers etc.

Nowadays, USB audio players are also available the market. These devices may also have slots for plugging in a pair of headphones, and also tiny buttons with which to play, pause, stop or forward music tracks that are stored onto the device.

The advantages of having a flash drive as a storage device are:

• They are scratch proof compared to the floppy drives.
• They are compact.
• They are durable.
• Different types of pen drives have different types of memory storage capacity.
• They are fast and consume less power.

These jump drives also have some disadvantages. They are:

• Depending upon the quality of the USB Drive, they can sustain only a limited number of write and erase cycles before they fail. Normally they can support a few hundred thousand such cycles.
• Most USB Drives do not have a write-protect system. This can make computers open to virus attacks.

Nowadays the popularity of USB drives has increased so much, that they are being used as promotional items. Often we may see advertisements of such USB Drives and Devices being given away for free along with a purchase of a laptop or a desktop computer from a particular company or store.