An Introduction To USB Flash Drives

USB flash drives are compact memory sticks that act like a portable hard drive or floppy disk, letting the you store and transport computer data, music tracks or even video files.

At present, these drives are available in a variety of sizes from 128Mb right up to 16Gb although, due to their compact size, massive capacities are at a premium and any flash drive over 4Gb is cost prohibitive at the moment. As with everything in the electronics world though, prices will fall as technological knowledge increases.

USB flash drives have come a long way since their creation in 1988. The first of these drives were only able to hold 8Mb of data, although this was still a giant leap from the old 1.44Mb floppy disks they were invented to replace. Manufacturers worldwide soon saw the potential of these devices as many spawned their own brand of drives calling them Pen Drives, Thumb Drives, Chip Sticks, USB Keys any many, many more. They all do basically the same job by plugging into an available USB port, and allowing you to copy data to and from them.

USB flash drives do not need their own power source or battery to operate as they are powered by a USB computer port so data access is only possible if the USB flash drive is connected to a computer.